When Fantasy Becomes Reality: Online Love

Thomas Montgomery, is a married father of two in New York state. Montgomery invented two alternate identities and got both of them involved online with the 17-year-old girl persona of "Mary." Mary was really a forty-something married woman in West Virginia. He met her at the games site, Pogo.com. He then became so jealous that she was also seeing his co-worker online, that he shot the guy dead in the parking lot after work. The full story is in Wired magazine.

The Houston Chronicle reported that one in three women who met partners through online dating sites had sex with them "on the first date" -- and that 75 percent of those women didn't use condoms. The study contrasts this apparently risky behavior with the extensive care women take to stay safe in other ways, like doing formal background checks, meeting in a public place, telling a friend whom they're meeting, and setting up check-in calls.

Those pre-date e-mails and chats and dancing in virtual clubs build a relationship quickly. A real relationship, in the minds of the participants. The common thread among these stories is that people get deeply involved in online relationships and make decisions about their real lives. And these decisions impact the people involved and on those closest to them.

As Regina Lynn of Wired says, "We all know we do things in the heat of the moment that we might not if we stepped back and thought about it for a while. Online environments can extend that "heat of the moment" feeling over long periods of time; physical environments often don't. And then we do stupid things, like completely ignore our other relationships to be with our online lovers, instead of staying in balance. Or we get caught having IM sex at work and get fired."

She explains, "That's why we're so desperate to pretend it's all fantasy if it's online, so we can make the hard, painful, life-crushing parts go away. And that's why I get my panties in a bunch when people try to dismiss the reality of sex in virtual spaces. I'm all for cybersex, of course, but let's not pretend it doesn't have real consequences."

If you need further convincing that online love can disrupt real life love, the Wall Street Journal article on the man who spent all his time with his online wives in the game Second Life his real life wife is ready to divorce him.

Nearly 40% of men and 53% of women who play online games said their virtual friends were equal to or better than their real-life friends, according to a survey of 30,000 gamers conducted by Nick Yee, a recent Ph.D. graduate from Stanford University. More than a quarter of gamers said the emotional highlight of the past week occurred in a computer world, according to a survey, MIT's Press's journal Presence.

It's a sad commentary on modern life that the highlight of so many people's days is interfacing with a machine. Avatars talking with avatars. Fantasies interacting with fantasies. Yes reality is painful and online love can leave out the darker side of love for some. But if people are going to kill each other over a game, it shows that the fantasy has become the reality.