Can You Love Someone You Met Online After a Few Weeks

Story highlights

• Many couples who met online say they fell in love before they met in person
• The Web enabled Notre Dame'southward Manti Te'o to autumn for a woman who did not exist
• Professor: "Online technology ... enables having a connection that is faster and more direct"
• Maryland homo: Meeting online let me ask questions that I would not have asked face up to face

Jon's plane taxied to a gate at Los Angeles International Airport, and although he had been flying for 30 hours on a journeying from Southern asia to California, his eye pounded at the prospect of wrapping Katie, his fiancéhoped-for, in a bear hug.

In a calendar week and half, Jon would put his grandmother's diamond ring on Katie's finger and the ring would be woefully too big. The oversight was not due to thoughtlessness on his role, nor a mishap at the jeweler.

It was because Jon had never once held that hand in real life.

Katie, 24, is not a modern-24-hour interval postal service-social club bride and Jon, 32, is not a moneyed lonely heart. The couple, who work as Christian missionaries and requested their last names non be published for security reasons, met online while she was in San Diego and he was on a mission in Southern asia.

Two months prior to their October 2011 meeting in Los Angeles, Katie had sent Jon an e-mail, hoping to join his mission group. Jon, curious, had clicked through to her blog, which was replete with references to obscure devotional writers that he also admired. That initial contact led to months of east-mails and phone calls, costing Katie $600 in telephone bills, culminating, at last, in their decision to meet in the mankind. Today the couple are happily married with a baby girl.

Their relationship may seem like an outlier at a time when the world is looking askance at online relationships. As we all learned last month, the Cyberspace enabled Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o to fall for Lennay Kekua, a woman who does not be. "Catfish," a popular new MTV series based on a movie by the same name, captures audiences with tales of online beloved that quickly devolve into lies.

And all over the Web, onlookers have been wondering: Is it possible to autumn in honey with someone yous've never met?

A fast connexion‬

Despite the current atmosphere of distrust, falling in love sight unseen, often through the written word, has been happening for centuries. The Web has simply made information technology easier. Some experts say communicating online before meeting IRL (that's In Real Life) tin really foster potent relationships by helping those with similar interests come together over dandy distances. Potential lovers overlook superficial turnoffs, and people open up upwards to each faster and more deeply.

"Online technology, as well every bit SMS, enables having a connectedness that is faster and more direct," said Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa and author of the volume "Dearest Online: Emotions on The Net." "Information technology besides enables ongoing dialogue as compared to the slow interactions that are typical of letters."

Translation: While it may have taken months to a twelvemonth for couples to communicate and therefore grow closer in the past, today we tin can have lengthy, deep interactions with a stroke of a fundamental (or touchscreen).

Greyness Howe counts his relationship with his wife Michelle, both in their tardily 30s, as ane of the earliest examples of online dating.

"It was 1994, so there was not really an Internet every bit yous know it today," he said. "We met through IRC."

IRC refers to "Internet Relay Chat," a form of computer-based chat that was developed in the late 1980s. "Cyberspace Relay Chat, at the fourth dimension, you had to know your stuff," Howe said. "So if you were on IRC, you were pretty much guaranteed to be talking to the smart people. And I lucked out; I talked to a smart woman."

Greyness talked with Michelle for about six months on the phone and via IRC before climbing on his motorcycle and driving from San Diego to Denver to see her in person for the starting time time. He never left. Thirteen years later, they got married, ironically plenty for the technologically inclined couple, in a 1870s Victorian-themed anniversary.

Since Greyness and Michelle's 1994 love connectedness, the prospect of online love has become more and more than mainstream. A 2010 study found that nearly 1-quarter of heterosexual couples surveyed had met via the Spider web, making the Internet the second-most-common way to find a partner after meeting through friends.

Someone like you lot (who's like me)

And so what makes these digital relationships successful? According to a 2002 study, "Relationship Formation on The Cyberspace: What'due south The Large Attraction?" one of the key draws of Internet relationships of all kinds is the ability to discover people who like the same stuff that you do.

This was the example for Amanda Goldstein Marks, 35, who met her futurity hubby Aaron in 1999 via Jewish dating site JDate.

In the commencement, Amanda signed up for the site without whatsoever intention of going on dates, she only wanted to look at her cousin's pictures. Simply before long after putting up her profile, sans photos, she met Aaron, who was drawn to the mention of Jewish summertime camp on her page.

Amanda talked with Aaron for months, without seeing any pictures of him, before the couple finally met -- like Jon and Katie, at an aerodrome -- when he returned from summer vacation to nourish college.

"I watched him walk off the plane, and I remember thinking, 'This is then weird because it's non weird.' Information technology felt like I was coming together an former friend," she said.

A year later, by which indicate they were officially dating, the ii discovered that their grandmothers had attended the same Jewish summer military camp in Cleveland, Ohio, a strange coincidence because Amanda grew upward in Alabama and Aaron in New Mexico.

"[Jewish summer camp] was important to us, and it was important to us because it was important to our parents, considering it was important to our grandparents," said Amanda, who works at an advert agency. "So it kind of felt like my fate was sealed."

While Amanda says that the two were not officially dating during the months preceding their first meeting, and although she had never seen a motion-picture show of Aaron, she yet says their connection was deep.

"All I knew was that he was tall and had brown hair and blue eyes, so every guy I saw who kind of fit that clarification, I would look at him and I would say, 'If that were Aaron, would I yet like him?'" said Amanda, who now lives with Aaron in Decatur, Georgia. "The answer was always yep."

Beloved can be blind -- literally

Amanda'south attraction to a man she had never seen before is not uncommon: studies have been washed on this phenomenon for decades. Ane of the about famous is 1973's ominous-sounding "Deviance In The Dark," in which interactions betwixt students were observed in both pitch-nighttime and well-lit rooms.

Those who met in the nighttime room, on the whole, were much more open and intimate with their fellow participants than those who met face-to-face nether the fluorescents. In short: When you get rid of all the stress attached to contiguous meetings, people feel more free to be themselves and get to know each other.

That approach worked for Keith A. Masterson, 41, and Gabriel-Thomas Masterson, 37. Subsequently meeting via a Facebook group comment chain, the couple spent hours daily chatting on Facebook and the phone before meeting two months after. The couple are now married and living in Colonial Heights, Virginia.

"In our situation, (meeting online) gave me the opportunity to ask questions that I probably would not have asked face to face at that time," Masterson said.

Gabriel-Thomas agreed: "One of the reasons we moved then rapidly was because we spent so much time on the phone talking."

Some research besides suggests that chatting online beginning can take a benign result on face-to-face relationships. In the "Relationship Formation on The Net" study, the authors tested whether a group of students liked each other more after an online or in-person meeting. They institute the online group was much more chummy, in role considering of the quality of the digital interaction itself. In short: The Web allowed participants to pare abroad interpersonal distractions and focus on communicating openly and honestly.

Granted, there are some pitfalls with besides much online interaction before meeting in person.

Dr. Artemio Ramirez, Jr., associate professor of communication at the University of South Florida, has done his own research on the effects of online communications on offline relationships.

"If you meet someone face to face before long after you lot meet them online, it'due south not necessarily going to lead to someone having a positive relationship, but waiting longer increases the possibility that things are not going to work out," he said. "We tend to develop in our heads these impressions of what nosotros think that person is like, fifty-fifty though the realities of communication do not reverberate that."

Yet, Ramirez says the consequence of idealization can exist mitigated by expanding a human relationship across the bounds of the written give-and-take.

"When people rely on more text-based forms of communication, that's where yous really see people idealizing. When people in relationships can talk on the phone or via Skype, it's more than of a reality check," he said. "Each new form of communication incrementally gives united states of america more information virtually that person."

"Catfishing" goes mainstream

Of course, non all online dear diplomacy pay off as well equally those detailed above. Manti Te'o fell for a adult female he was told died of cancer, a woman he had to say "goodbye" to twice after he found out she never existed.

The Web is full of tricksters. One 2008 report found that 81% of online daters admitted to lying about their weight, height, historic period or a combination of the 3 on their profiles. The Spider web allows users to present their best selves to the public, and sometimes those selves are exaggerated.

However, just considering the object of i's online angel isn't existent doesn't mean that ane's feelings aren't.

Nev Schulman, the protagonist in the 2010 documentary "Catfish," knows better than anyone most the heartbreak caused by falling for someone who doesn't exist.The movie details how he cruel for a Michigan woman named Megan Faccio, who turned out to be an intricate fabrication created by a lonely wife and mother. The moving-picture show, and the related TV series, has raised awareness of such hoaxes and even given the public a term with which to categorize them: "catfishing."

"Once I kind of came to terms with the reality that this daily lather opera that I was tuning into, and the long distance love matter that I was having, got canceled and everything sort of shut downwards, at commencement I was incredibly lonely," Schulman said.

"It's a double insult," said Dr. Michael Adamse, writer of "Affairs of the Net: The Cybershrinks' Guide to Online Relationships." "Because on one hand it's the loss of a dear object.... There'due south also the humiliation attached to information technology, also, feeling badly about yourself. Not just have I lost somebody that was never really in dear with me, but I've also been duped."

Despite what happened to Schulman, and the unlucky souls on his testify who fell in love with mirages, both he and his "Catfish" co-host, Max Joseph, say that it is possible to autumn in love successfully online.

"Anybody, when they meet 1 of usa, they want to tell the states that they know people who accept been in online relationships and half the time the stories are really positive," Joseph said. "They have actually happy endings."

The trick, they said, is to be smart about your online dear affair before getting in too deep.

To have and to hold

All the couples interviewed for this story take one integral thing in common: Each and every i of them eventually met in real life to solidify their relationship.

"If you're really starting to 'fall' for somebody, information technology'southward very of import to have that IRL to see if the fantasy matches the reality," said Adamse. "Non until you're really in a situation where yous're face to face with that person, spending time with that person, will you be able to access really what that reality is."

When Jon the missionary got off that plane in Los Angeles, after flying halfway around the earth, he was moments away with finding out if his fantasy matched the woman waiting for him, the one he described as "my heart in the course of a girl." The one he was so certain about that he had procured the (too-large) ring and planned to put it on her finger in the presence of family and friends.

"Everything struck me about her," he said years subsequently, recalling that day when he stepped off the plane and into Katie'southward artillery.

"In all reality, the affair that attracted me the well-nigh about Katie all along was her heart, which was and is incredibly cute. But when I saw her in person I was able to meet her inner beauty radiate through her eyes and her smile. I was a goner pretty quick."

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Source: https://www.cnn.com/2013/02/14/tech/social-media/online-love/index.html

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