love knows no time, love knows no distance

Until very recently,  in historical terms in the blink of an eye, you were likely to love and marry someone from your own village / town / county / state, after all these were the  only people you were ever likely to meet.  Then came reliable mail, and I’m talking paper and the mailman here, together with the widespread use of the telephone, and people started to have pen-pals, and fall in love with them.

Fast forward to the late 20th century and we have instant emails, and now video chat, and it becomes perfectly possible to develop a deep and meaningful relationship with someone you have never actually met, who lives a couple of thousand miles away, or on the other side of the world.  Add in blogs, Facebook, Instagram, tumblr, and sundry chat / dating / sex sites and the potential for a long-distance love affair is as good as meeting the boy / girl next door.

But, all you have is electronic, and you can’t actually have sex with an electronic person…..  and I’m  not going into the esoteric and erotic world of remotely controlled sex toys.

How can you actually be friends with someone you have never met, and know only through their blog, and some emails, and online chats?  It turns out that it’s very easy, maybe easier than meeting someone from the office, or in a bar, or a friend of a friend.  To begin with if you meet someone online you are both starting with a clean slate, and there are no interfering family members or other friends to get in the way.  Also, and in my experience, it’s much much easier to be completely honest and open with someone you meet online than it is with someone you meet in any other way.  Perhaps most importantly, for women thinking of being online friends with a guy, he isn’t going to be a stranger expecting first date sex.

The bottom line is, your long-distance friend might just be the best friend you’ve ever had.

However, leaving aside the whole sex thing for now, there are a few downsides in an online long-distance relationship.

• Time zones.  If you’re in California and he’s in England he is 8 hours ahead of you.
• Identity.  Are you talking with who you think you are?  Who you think is a cute 30 years old woman in California might be a fat trucker from Detroit.
• Marital status.  She may say she’s single, or he may say he’s divorced, but both of them could be married with kids.
• Honesty.  It’s easy to lie if you are 5,000 miles apart, how do you check the truth?
• Meeting.  That first meeting could be fraught, you will be nervous, it might never happen.  But that is no different from having a blind date.

It’s an on line relationship, so use the internet to your advantage.  Google the object of your affections is a good start.  You know the rest.

Some might say that it’s difficult to have a relationship if you’re a couple of thousand miles apart.  And, how can you have a love affair if you hardly ever see one-another?  All I know is that it happens all the time.

~

jack collier

jackcollier7@talktalk.net

at least she’s a woman

and not a trucker from Detroit