MorningRose Posted July 25, 2004 Posted July 25, 2004 Hello. This is my first post for this forum. I just thought of sharing you this bizaare feeling of being clueless yet still hang on to a "love" that may not even be there. I met someone on a chat channel I frequent. We have been talking for more than a year and officially been together for 10 months. It was an intense relationship... well, still is but not as it was on the first few months. Things have gone sour two months ago. Words -- chats, phone calls and whatnots can tire people at times. No physical togetherness, all talk. I was all set to travel way east to meet him then. We broke up but decided to hang out again after a while -- No spoken promise of love, no promise of the future. I love him and I'm decided to take anything he can offer. I still get hurt when I think about how we were before, when his sentence almost always starts and ends with "i love you." My birthday's in a few days and there is this fervent wish that after months of threading vague grounds, I'd hear him say that. That he still loves me... Is it right to hold on with the occasional hurt or give up completely and endure the pain in one sitting hoping that tomorrow's better -- alone or with someone else?
StartingAgain Posted July 25, 2004 Posted July 25, 2004 You've never met this man. What was happening was an Internet flirt. Nothing more. If this man *really* loved you, he would not have let a whole year go by without wanting to meet you in person. You can't really love someone you've never laid eyes on. Move on and forget this. Also, realize that Internet chat rooms are a place to have a bit of fun and conversation, but not to find love. It is possible to hook up with someone in one, but you have to actually take a more traditional approach after that. Alwys keep in mind that a lot of the poeple who lurk in chat rooms are sick and like to screw with people's heads. This is why I never use them. You have no way of knowing who you are really dealing with.
honey2005 Posted July 31, 2004 Posted July 31, 2004 You can't really love someone you've never laid eyes on. I completely disagree with that. I met someone in a chatroom 3 years ago, and I'm still with them. We haven't met in person yet, he's waiting until I get out of high school. It's a long story, but it will be easier on both of us that way. I don't think it matters if you've met in person. Chatting, talking on the phone, and mailing letters is enough for me to know that I love him.
daydreaming Posted July 31, 2004 Posted July 31, 2004 sorry, but I agree completely with StartingAgain. You cannot love someone in the original sense of the word as long as you haven't met him. Ok, so appearance doesn't matter to you, that's fine with me - but how about everyday life? You don't know how the person reacts to everyday conflicts and stuff, bcs you have never seen him in a situation like that. You only know and love one aspect of the person's character, and that's no basis for a relationship - you have to love and accept a person as ONE.
StartingAgain Posted July 31, 2004 Posted July 31, 2004 Honey, the key to your post is "he's waiting until I get out of high school." You've never laid eyes on some stranger from a chat room, yet you say you are still "with" him. Well you're not WITH. He's just a romantic notion of yours. I'd be willing to bet you dinnier in the finest restuarant in the country that you weill either never meet this "guy" or if you do, he will not be who you thought he was. In reality, you know nothing about this person. I see the protest forming on your lips, but it means nothing. You don't know HIM; rather, you know a persona, nothing more. You are in love with the idea or love, with something very near a fictional character, someone who can be anything he wants to be and never reveal his true self. For your sake, I hope your are doing as every healthy teenaged girl should be doing and dating boys in your own circle. If you have been sitting around for three years waiting on cyberman, you are going to regret it big time.
honey2005 Posted July 31, 2004 Posted July 31, 2004 I hope your are doing as every healthy teenaged girl should be doing and dating boys in your own circle. If you have been sitting around for three years waiting on cyberman, you are going to regret it big time. I've thought that many times. I didn't know how much I loved him for the first year and a half, it was just a little crush, and he was still dating people around him, and so was I. But after awhile he was all I could think about, and vice versa. In less than a year I will meet him in person, and hopefully we will hit it off as well as we do online. He's funny, sweet, and very honest. That's the one thing I don't have to worry about, him not being fully honest with me. He may be far away, but I still have complete trust in him. My friend met a guy online about 5 years ago. She talked to him a little over 3 years before she got a chance to meet him in person. He came down and met her, stayed with her for awhile, then went back home. A few months later he moved down here to be with her. They are now engaged and are going to get married in less than a year. You should see how they look at each other, I've never seen two people more in love. I'm not saying everyone that meets online will get a happy ending, but I am saying that I'm willing to give it a try.
moimeme Posted August 1, 2004 Posted August 1, 2004 And I saw a story on an investigative TV show about a girl who had been 'with' a guy for something like six years online. She, too, believed they would be together. She, too, believed he was completely honest. The TV show tracked him down. He was married, had a bunch of kids, was unemployed, and lived in a trailer park. I'm not saying it's impossible to meet a good person online, but you have to meet him in 3D as soon as you can to see if he's like his online self. And yes, you can love what you know about him (assuming it's true, which it may not be), but as the others pointed out, that's only part of his personality and may not even be the most important part if he has some fairly serious flaws - like being married.
Author MorningRose Posted August 1, 2004 Author Posted August 1, 2004 Hi! I agree with the previous post. In all honesty, you only know and love a part of one's personality through talking to him - be it text-based or voice. Meeting him is another story -- does he snore? got annoying habits you might not take? i might not like how he looks. But then again, that also goes with meeting a someone and loving how he looks. In the long run, you MIGHT hate how he thinks. And I do agree that you MAY be meeting some people who would be talking to you just for kicks. But then again, I have met some couples who have met in the chatroom, met in real life and in the long run decided that life with be better with each other around. I think it's a matter of chances... It's up to the individual if he wants to take it and live with the consequences that goes with it.
StartingAgain Posted August 1, 2004 Posted August 1, 2004 Yes, yes, many people meet on-line. My ex and I met on-line, though not in a chat room. She posted to a forum for systems administrators with a question about a problem with a system she'd been charged with managing, but on which she had no training. I responded with a fix to her problem. She wrote me back-channel to thank me and we got to chattering. We lived in different cities and carried on an email and phone corresponence for about six weeks before we decided to meet in person. See the difference? We were both adults and we had the freedom to do what we needed to do to see if we could take this on-line beginning to the next level. A minor cannot do this. We didn't try to have a multi-year on-line romance, which really, when you think about it, is a bit absurd. I'd say that if you've "met" someone on-line who lives in another city and go more than a few weeks without at least exchanging digital images of yourselves, there's something major league fishy going on. Even if you do get pictures, you have no way of knowing it they are real or bogus. I've had several women tell me that the picture they were sent was not of the man they met in person or that it was a picture taken when he was 15 years younger and 80 pounds lighter. I tried chat rooms once. My take on them was that most of them are full of teenagers and/or freaky people. Obviously, the teen chat rooms should be just for teens. But even though the moderators of teen chat rooms try to be vigilant, there are always adult men who lurk about in them. And some of these are potentially dangerous. Some of them are not moderated at all. For this reason, were I a father, there would be no way in hell, I'd let my teenager participate in chat rooms without supervision. I know several guys who use chat rooms a lot. Most of them are straight up, but a few of them have on-line persona that in no way represent who they really are. One guy I has at least three different on-line persona (that I know of) and one of these is of a 22 year old woman (he's a 38 year old man). It's a big game to him; he's just having some rather sick fun. You really have no way of knowing who you are dealing with in a chat room.
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