Is the e-relationship taking away the face-time?

Conducting a courtship via email, thats nice, but is it taking away the face value?

How can anyone substitute flesh and blood for screens and plugs?

To me all internet dating is is a virtual-world fairytale were broadband breeds wit and verbal foreplay, and unsavoury things like bad hair, geography and pre-date jitters don't exist.
All that seems to matter is that your confidence jacket, is a good fit!

Either way though, an e-relationship can't necessarily be the bed of (e-card) roses it appears to be. Or is it?

When your romancing online, having a "connection", as it were, with someone is easy. So how do you know what "studmonkey27" really does for a job, how his breath smells, or the fact that he wears boat shoes?

How can anyone know any of these things, when online all that seems to matter is that his email personality is enough to keep you stimulated, and he knows how to press Send?

It's so easy to construct an artificial persona, one that is hilarious, sharp and attractive, on email. You can "virtually" edit yourself to perfection.

Example; in just a few short to-and-fros, a couple manage to cover off date etiquette, stinginess and a hint at sex. Can you imagine having this conversation face to face with a girl or guy?
Unlikely!
It seems real life like takes the back seat in an e-relationship. It's all smoke and mirrors: he doesn't get the real you, nor do you get the real him.

"But after 456 emails, of course we know each other!" Come on. Nothing substitutes for a real conversation - as they say, 60 per cent of communication is non-verbal.

To me, an e-relationship is only an imitation of a relationship. It breeds a false sense of intimacy and potentially, affect our ability to be (genuinely) intimate in real life.

In an e-relationship you are Super-you: sexually forward, willing to bleed your deepest secrets, and never cranky. You flirt and play, and everyday is fun. And if their being an obnoxious e-Ken or Barbie, it's real easy to turn your computer off.

In a relationship, I believe flirting forms the introduction, not the foundation. Real life steps in. You have to deal with his moods and how he slurps his soup. And he has to handle your PMS and fake tan on his towels and still want to ravish you.

This warts and all business is good, in my opinion. To grow as a couple and as individuals, you have to deal with "stuff". Real life's not about emoticons and hitting "Escape" when it gets tough.

So is email a form of self-censorship? And when you censor those "undesirable" parts of yourself, do you forget to tolerate other's shortcoming?

A mature relationship stems from taking the bees with the honey.
Maybe it's time to log off and find a guy or girl who will like you even when your more than ?

I met my current boyfriend online...

We exchanged messages back and forth in September, and then stopped talking for a while. Then, the Monday before New Years, we started talking again. I met him that Thursday for karaoke (with plenty of my friends around to protect me in case he was a weirdo). Then, he invited me over to his place on New Year's...the rest is history. We're inseparable now.

It's weird knowing that I met him online. Most people would look at me as if I was a psycho for dating someone that you meet on the computer, but I think our relationship was a jump in and do it kind of relationship. The internet provided the means for our meeting, but we didn't really connect until we met in person.

online relationships make no sense to me. meeting someone online and then emailing to ask to go out to dinner is one thing.. but being 'inlove' with someone who lives thousands of miles from you who youve never met.. i just dont buy it. how can you say you love someone when youve never spent any physical time with them? how do you know that they dont have some little habit that will just make you want to stab them in the face? maybe they have a bad habit of picking their noses, or belching in public. you never know. that's not the kind of thing you can figure out through I.M. you know?

that was such a dodgy magazine piece.

i've never done it but,

marriages in which the people have courted over the internet have a lower divorce rate.

the reason given by psycologists for this is that when you meet online, initially a person is inclined to lie slightly about themselves, as a relationship progresses a person feels more and more free to open up to a person since there is little chance of embarassment.
and eventually the two people do know each other in depth, without any outside influence or expectations.
hell, in victorian times, people had whole courtships through post. and it wasn't considered ill advised.

...........you could just say they were lonely and desperate if you were particularly cynical

I disagree. I find that when talking to a person 'online' then any of these bad preconceptions of yourself are banished. You are safe knowing that you can end the current talk at anytime. You feel safe enough to be able to tell the other person exactly what you are thinking. You are able to tell them things about you that you wouldn't be able to on the first, second, maybe even 10th date.

Yes being online allows a person to create a mask or an image of how they want to be seen, but after a while, this mask will slowly fall and you will get to see the other person for who they really are.

With regards to sending hundreds of emails, if you are still at that stage, and haven't even at least got a phone number to call them on, then you are just playing into the hands of someone who is enjoying leading you on.

I can give you an example on here. When I first joined, I was talking to a few people, sending hundreds of PMs each week. Treacle was one of the first. We knew that we got on with each other, we had a good laugh and so when I asked for her phone number she gave it. If after the hundreds of PMs we had sent and received she refused to give me her number, then I would have assumed there was a strange reason behind and would have not continued. The fact that either of rarely use each others number is not important. It is the fact that we trusted each other in the first place to do it.

Wow, that was long.

if i had the money i'd travel all over the world meeting the great people and freinds who i met on here 8)

but look at it from a teenage standpoint. i would s*** a brick knowing that my teenager was talking to some guy on the phone that she met online.

using the internet you can build up a trust that is completely false, only to have the person who you love oh so much, come and hack you up into little pieces in the middle of the night.

hell, that can happen in real life too,
its a problem and something that everyone has to be careful of
kids shouldn't be unsupervised online to that degree.

but the thread was about starting relationships over the Internet and whether it's advisable.
i don't see a problem with it.
it's made a lot of people happy.

and if you don't like him in person, you don't see him again.
just like if you met in a pub and then decided against it.

Yes, I can see that point of view

it seemed to me the thread was about relationships that are solely conducting via the internet. not just meeting someone on line and going out for drinks. maybe i was wrong, but that's what i got from it

i dunno,
i say be careful and stay aware and do what feels right.

I know people who have had affairs for years online, never actually knowing who the person is.
Then one day out of the blue they decide they want to meet, and the person turns out mot to be what they were cracked up to be.

Essentially these people have waisted years when they could have met someone real in person, thats my point!

I have to agree with everything steveuk has said

*
guy and girl meet online
they date online
they get married online
they practice the physical act of love virtually and online
Not only do they pollute the online world with porn in ASCII but they also create a bunch of online Artificial Intelligent Borgs destined to take over the human race.
*
Run for your lives and adopt the good old ways!

..............??

actually me and marcus have a budding on-line relationship.
i'm going to marry that big alien head