Webmistress and sole proprietor
J. A. Stroud a.k.a. GlassPoet.
Nothing on these pages may be used without the express permission of the author / webmistress.
I’ll try not to be irreverent. I mean, I actually know that finding love on the Net can and does happen. People chat, Email, talk on the phone, eventually meet in person and have even gone on to marriage.
My personal opinion is that those endings, although sweet, are rare.
Most online romances seem to end with one or both parties hiding out from one another. Invisible, in stealth mode! They went through all the same steps, chatting, writing letters, talking for hours on the phone, they finally meet ... and nada Zip! Zilch! The spark wanes in the light of reality.
I think it’s that the non-reality of cyber chatting leaves far too much room for the imagination. For assumptions and presumptions. Even if pictures have been traded and voices heard ... we still allow our imaginations to take over and create what, in all
likelihood, may not be there. The cyber persona can be greater than the man or woman, themselves, even if honesty was there from the beginning.
It’s a human flaw ... and we have many!
I mean, heck ... I’m honest about who and what I am. I am a middle-aged, overweight, female smoker. Sure, sure, I like to tell them that I look like Barbie, but that my feet bend. *laughing* When pushed, I bring out that old picture, one of those far away shots,sunglasses firmly planted on my face! But, for me, I don’t need a picture to know if I
want to continue to chat with anyone, male or female.
I go in and out of chat rooms. The big thing in some of them, is the use of gifs or JPEG’s. We all know that the gifs aren’t really of the chatter who is using them, and even JPEG’s can be misleading. Yet, if you lurk about long enough, you’ll soon realize that the men and women using those sexy gifs (e.g., scantily clad females, men with gorgeous bods,
sans a shirt!) all get the most attention. Doesn’t it give you reason to pause? I mean, come
on!! Would you really chat with these people if you didn’t have that visual? Believe me,some of them can’t even conjugate a verb!
They hide behind the gifs and JPEG’s. They dominate a room, with their bawdy language; sexual innuendo and flirting abound. I’ve often wondered if they started using those images because the first few times they tried to engage anyone in conversation in
those chat rooms, they were ignored.
But, I digress here ...
We are taking about online romance.
So, people chat, become addicted to one another, for whatever reasons, be it unhappy marriages, pure unadulterated sexual need, loneliness, boredom, They often imagine that their chat partner is everything that they have been looking for in a mate or damn close to it.
I think it’s all come down to imagination and conjugating the proper verb.
Online romances are a fact of the cyber world. You either learn to deal with them and protect yourself, or you log off.
And don’t get me started on telling you my opinions about cybersex!
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