ladychatterley
Posts: 132
Joined: 3/10/2006 Status: offline
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In my always humble opinion (and if you believe that, I have some terrific oceanfront real estate available in Kansas...) internet relationships can often fall into a very specific set of traps. Specifically, people (vanilla or not) connect with this one shared interest/passion/hobby and they tend to be much more open about vulnerabilities/things they haven't shared much/letting down their guard very quickly because the internet gives us a feeling of anonymity. If a relationship stays on the internet for very long, in my experience (and the experience of quite a few friends), it has little chance of actually working (not none, but little) because you develop this intense, passionate, vulnerable and really quite profound connection and then you meet this person in real life and realize you shared all these things with them too quickly and you can't get real-life to match the level of emotional vulnerablity/intimacy you've developed. (I even had this happen with a gay pen pal, and I'm a straight chick, so we had NO romantic intimations of any sort, but it still happened.) The real difficulty is moving a relationship from on-line to real life and I think it is a hard one to pull off. So for me, before I found my Dom (here), I wanted to meet as quickly as possible. In my experience, people just aren't the same in real life as they present themselves on-line. Even if they are totally, 100% honest, they are presenting themselves as they see themselves (or possibly as they wish to be) and it is nearly impossible to know who you really are in all areas. So for me, I would screen for a couple of things (and make sure we were looking for the same things) via e-mail, move to a phone call as soon as possible. For me, discussion of sex needed to be relatively clinical on e-mail—I didn’t want to talk about sex at all on the phone. I just didn’t do phone sex and I didn’t like it when I felt like I was being pushed there. If I was attracted to their voice (which is actually more important to me than looks) and there was chemistry (for me, I really wanted someone who I could have intellectual, quick conversation with that kept me intellectually engaged), I would try to get together quickly. I always met for coffee, usually with a planned event a couple of hours later so I could get out if there wasn't chemistry. In my opinion, in an ideal world, 3 or 4 e-mail exchanges and 20 minutes on the phone should be enough to risk an hour on coffee within a week, although the person I'm now with, we talked for about 6 hours in the 24 hours after we started e-mailing and met the next day. I'm not nearly as concerned about developing an intimate connection over the phone as I am over e-mail. I don't have the tendency to overshare the same way.
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