Online Relationships?
 

I was wondering what were your thoughts on the subject? I am currently in an Online Relationship and was hoping for oppinions, thoughts, or advise. Do you generally agree or disagree with them and why?

Eh, I don't see why there should be anything bad about it. If you REALLY know the person and their not hiding anything from you, online relationships can be just as good as real ones.

i myself disagree. there are predators over the computer. if you meet someone online they could lie to you and you not even realize. its someone on another screen. you can possibly think you know that person, but honestly how do you know everything they are saying is the truth?? and if you believe you know this person and decide to meet face to face. bring a friend, and meet in a highly populated place. this way that person cant try anything.
here is kasie's story i believe people should read this. i know this girls family and its a sad thing that happened to her. these things happen to often and can be prevented.
Caught in the Web

To be honest I don't think they're something you can agree or disagree with. That would be like agreeing, or disagreeing with the existence of trees. Online relationships exist, they're real, and to some extent rather successful. I had a halfway decent relationship that started online. It was really great, and we're still friends, so I see no problem with them whatsoever.

I myself am not totaly for it, but I am not against it. I have had online relationships myself. I know they have worked(they have for me) but I am completely aware of stalkers and fakes. So I am very careful about online relationships. They work great, but I am just friends now with my online exs. I think before you start an online realationship would shoudl first work on being online friends. Just like a relationship in real life. That way you will knwo that person, know their interests, and have a pretty good idea of when they are lying or not. :)

true true

But then agian some people are fakes from the begining, even as online friends so I never let my guard down. While I am just friends I always test them and ask questions to see if they are telling the truth. I don't say I am testing you to see if you are lying but I just bring up some questions casually and it works out. If they are telling the truth I can tell. If they lie then I usually can tell and confront them. To me this is both Simple and Hard. :)

I think agreeing or disagreeing is not really the exact term you're looking for. I'm guessing you're asking if we think they can work or not?

I personally don't think they can work. They can last, certainly, I've seen them last; but never end on a happy note. It generally takes a bit to make a relationship work: you need to know your partner, find them attractive (not physically but as a person), all that. You don't have that with online relationships. You have words on a screen. Whose words? You don't know. It's as likely that it's a young teenager that lives with his parents as it is that it's a bald fat middle-aged man. I've been argued against with such sentences as "there are webcams, mics, we can listen to each other's voices and see each other's faces", but is that enough to know a person?

If it's an online relationship and you think about it well, you'll never know your partner as you know your actual friends, those you love and go to school with. Plus, if you're online two or three hours a day, how can you completely trust what your partner is doing the remaining twenty one hours? There's no way to know, you have to rely on words. In my view, that's never a good foundation for a relationship.

This is generally a very good policy, though I have to say it depends on the person and how good liars they are. I'm a very good liar, I daresay, which means (in my case) I can tell very easily when someone's lying, but it's very hard to catch my lies. But I don't take credit away from you, most people don't even think about doing that, ever. I find it highly disturbing.

Online relationships are a difficult subjeect... However, they can work out. I met my boyfriend on Quizilla almost four years ago, and we're still together. I've met him several times in person since then. I'm aware that I'm incredibly lucky, but I'm just saying, it can happen. Just be careful.

Honestly online relationships are your choice. No one can really tell you if they are good or bad at all. If you don't really know this person that you are dating very well, then its probably a red light if they are asking you out because they think 'your cute'. Who can tell who's the real you behind the picture? Then again, if you know the guy really well, then go for it. It won't harm you as much. But be careful, people can pose as people younger than themselves, so be wary

I agree with them to a ponit. I am in one right now as well.
I have been dating him for 10 months now and we have met in person 3 times and he is coming back to my place again on april 2ed for a week. we met on facebook and live 9 hours away from each other.

I can understand why you disagree with them but they do work out. If you start off as friends you can first get to know the person so you can see if they are actually I nice person or not or if they just want to go right into a 'relationship' so they can get information about you. I always start off with just being friends. Then I ask a bit about the person. I met a guy online and we learned that we lived in the same time zone, because I usually start off with giving just that, they will not know where I live because time zones are huge. Then when I learned that he lived in my same time zone I asked him about his area and It was actually in the same state as me. I learned that he lived less then 2 hours away from me. To test him I asked him his favorite radio station because usually only locals know that becaue I could not name a radio station on Boston if my life depepded on it. He responded really quickly so I knew that he was telling the truth because he responded way to quickly to look up radio stations in my area so I knew he was telling the truth. I then asked more questions and he answered them all correctly and honestly. We are very great friends but not in any way looking to start a relationship. We are both in seperate ones anyways. So Getting to know that person definatly helps when dealing with people online. It can lead to frienships and rlationships that work out great. :3

I am in a relatiionship but even though we are close I am VERY paranoid when it comes to meeting in real life with a person I met on the internet. That is something that is just a flat out NO if we meet online and they ask. I will usually stop contacting that person right then and there. Meeting in real life is something that I am very scared of. I can only think of one person I would meet in real life and I have met thousands of people online. I only trust one guy and he isn't even my online boyfriend. He is just my friend but I trust him A LOT. :}

Very true. Love is love afterall :D

Online relationships are very, very tricky. A large number of my relationships and friendships for that matter have started on the internet, usually in a chatroom, sometimes in the past on myspace or other random websites. When I was younger (ie: 15-18) I would have told you that I was 100% for online relationships. The reason I would have said that then was that I had never had a real relationship in person until I was 18 (I had a boyfriend for a few days in 8th grade but we only held hands once, not a real relationship). So, I didn't have anything to compare it with at all. Now, I have met some amazing people from the internet, I have friends that I see today that I met through the internet, but I can't say that I still regularly talk to any of my exes that I met and started dating on the internet.
With the internet, as people have already mentioned, you have to be wary of people: they may not be who they seem. I have had boyfriends who turned out to be girls and girlfriends that turned out to be boys. People have no problem faking being a vegetarian, boy, girl, skinny, young, old on the internet because all they are doing is typing words. Just seeing a picture of someone is not enough to know they are who they say they are, it could be a picture of someone else. Also, if you see someone just once on webcam just for a minute and they won't ever go on again...they probably put a friend up to webcamming with you...I've had that happen to me before. A lot of times you just have to go with your gut....if something feels off, trust that.
Now, for the people I have met from the internet...they all were who they said they were...at least in the age sex appearance categories. Almost every ex of mine from the internet that I met in person though lied about one thing or another that came out eventually after we met.
Another issue with online dating is that even if you meet the person, you probably won't see them very often unless they live close by. Sometimes when two people have been online dating, they move in with each other quicker than they would have if they had been dating and met in person, lived in the same town/city/county/state and that can cause some issues of its own: when the relationship goes bad, one person is far away from home: did they sell their house? Move out of their parent's house? Alienate their family (it happens a lot, a lot of families don't approve of online relationships). That is on top of worrying about what stuff is yours and any other thing that occurs because of the termination of the relationship.
My final word on online relationships is that I do not encourage them but using the internet as a way to find a date in the local area I would say is not an online relationship, therefore a whole different story and is just like any other blind date.

Very true, very true indeed. Now that I think about it, Online dating is like blind dates...with a lot more distance. But like you said, trust your gut :}

Personally I could never be in an online or a long distance relationship. I need to see the person I'm with on a regular and frequent basis. So for that reason I could never do it.

However, I do think that online relationships can work if they have plans to move to a long distance one as opposed to being exclusively online. I think online relationships that stay so are doomed to failure.

I couldn't be in an online relationship because I'm very much into being with someone. I like to touch and I like to hold hands with a boyfriend so I would never be able to cut myself off from him that much.

@ Pixie and Toohsie: A physical relationship is very important. Oh god that came out wrong. No that is not what I ment! Okay let me rephrase that. Being with the person and seeing the person is VERY key in relationships :}

I agree 110% with how you put it.

I say hurray and good luck to those that can make it work, but I'm just not one of them.

Physical closeness is almost everything to me. I want to hug, kiss, snuggle, have sex with the person I'm with. Online, for me, can only sustain friendships because that's all I can feel for a person without being around them physically.