what would u do?

Awesome story.

Unfortunately this is just one of the sad symptoms of a fantasy/alternative environment like SL.

We all buy into the fantasy aspect; the "be all you want to be" thing. Very few of us decide to be anything less than beautiful, and for many the comcept of "love" in SL is as much feel-good fantasy as the tight abs and bottom they achieve just by logging in.

In order to support each other in this, it seems to me that there's often a tacit agreement between people in SL to mutually believe the persona that others want to convey.

The trouble is that in many cases two parties have different ideas about what constitutes just another phase in the fantasy and what is an actual RL commitment.

In my head it sort of goes like this.

1. You're beautiful
2. You're intelligent
3. I like you
4. You're a truly fantastic lover
5. I love you
6. You're my soul mate
7. My RL was nothing until I met you
8. Our meeting was destiny and one day fate will let us be together in RL.

Up until this point both parties are happy to go along for the ride, pretty much in the belief that this is all a beautiful dream that they are weaving together.

However at one point, one person believes the curtain has been torn and that dream has become reality.

9. I can't live without you, let's risk everything and meet in RL

One side believes this, the other immediately thinks.. sh*t this is getting out of hand - how do I get out?

I'm not such a cynic as to disbelieve the many wonderful stories of love which have unfolded from SL to RL.

I'm just cynical enough to acknowledge that they are probably a very small percentage compared to ones where a heart gets broken because two people have different ideas of where fantasy stops and reality starts.

I admit that tales of terminal diseases do smack of cowardice, but also in many cases a tacit agreement has been broken.

Anyway that's my view (long and painful as it is to read).

My heart does go out to anyone who has ever been in this position, but as the saying goes..

"You pick up one end of the stick, you also pick up the other."

Regardless of whether this guy is genuinely sick (the odds sound slim) or has ditched, what the OP should do is be a friend. You can't magic this guy back, but you can be supportive and listen. Don't preach, don't give advice. Just listen and be there, and let her work through it.

Can only be one of 2 reasons.

He is married and wife found out.
Or he is really a woman.

Or he's gay
Or he got scared
Or he found someone else

5. There are 5 reasons!
(Noone expects the spanish inquisition)

Sounds no different than how a real life relationship develops, except for #9 except it might be: I can't live without you, let's risk everything and get married. They get to the church and s/he fails to show up.

My parents married after knowing each other less than two weeks and, though it was a a rocky journey, stayed so for some 60+ years until their deaths three weeks apart.

Your attitude is not really cynical, but may be more realistic and practical, and one I admire. However, there are those of us, hopeless romantics, willing to jump in with both feet to experience passion and life, in love with being in love, and take the hurts in return.

I know someone in SL who does this repeatedly.

He's cozened several women, not just in SL but on phone, MSN, and webcam. He promises to meet them in RL, even promises marriage, swears undying love.

But something (usually a lot of somethings) always seems to come up.

It happens. Tell your friend to just cross him off her list. If he later shows up with the stitches and the X-rays, then she can apologize.

That sounds very close to what someone in our rp group did. An SL "friend" of his (that none of us, his close friends, had ever met before) came to tell us that our friend "B" had been killed in a car accident. Since he had pulled some disappearing acts when we knew him on IRC, we had our doubts.

Sure enough, a couple months later "B" shows up and says he was letting his "brother" use his SL account and his "brother" was the one who was killed in the car accident and the "friend" thought it was him.

Personally I don't think there ever WAS a car accident and no one was killed...except "B" might be in danger if he crosses my path again.

I'm sorry for your friend...but in the over 20 years I've been online in various mediums, this type of story appears again and again.

Guess I'm the dunce here, how is this any different than RL? In my 50+ years of RL, this has been the story over and over.

We like to set up a wall between the two worlds, but that is an artificial construct, and unless you are exceptional at boxing up emotions, the reality is SL and RL involve the same emotions and behaviours.

The stories here make it sound like somehow the online world is suppose to be different or is different - it isn't. Before the age of the internets, phones, and telegraphs, there were hand written letters through which people fell in love, then met and married.

Ut oh, showing my age on that one?

This is not a criticism, as much as my lack of understanding and appreciation for the differences between RL/SL relationships for which someone may be able to enlighten me.

Nah - its been done already. "Ode to Billie Joe"

(Billie Joe McAllister turned up a few weeks later)

You're right Paracelsus (good name by the way!), that it's a story not completely isolated to the realms of SL.

The only thing I'd say again however is that in most other mediums there isn't such a tacit acceptance of shared deceit - up until the point one or other decides this is actually a RL situation.

I'm also old enough to remember the days of pen pals and polaroids stuffed in envelopes.

I accept that it was common practice for young men to use pics of their good looking mate and girls likewise, I don't think however that both sides believed (or at least explicitly accepted) that this deceit was actually taking place and expected.

In SL people are often very assertive in their right to preserve anonymity and that RL should have no influence on who or what you can be in world. You just have to look at the number of profiles with no entry signs in the 1st life tab.

When a guy walks up to a girl with his avatar's muscled torso on display and compliments her on looking "hot" (yes I spend too much time watching the theatre that is ahern), they both know it is the avatar getting the compliments but neither would dream of taking it anything other than personally.

SL is addictive and immersive because it allows us to live our fantasies more deeply than has ever really been available to us before, so I think it really does present special difficulties and hazards.

Maybe he thought he would be safer there?

Bree, I'm sure someone has already beaten you to the punch.

Good comments, Atticus, so thank you for taking the time to lay out your thoughts. I take people as they present, in RL and SL, and make no assumptions about their lives, but I am rather well trained do so from my life's chosen profession.

If the relationship seems to be progressing toward a friendship, and/or byound, then I become cautious as the need to protect myself is instinctual and kicks into gear. But, having said that, I would much prefer to risk a relationship, with all its joys and pains, then to remain scared to never having loved and lost then never to have loved at all. [almost sounds . . . poetic, but I'll still keep my day job.]

The profiles that are a turn off for me are the ones that state, "I keep my RL separate from SL." Baloney, I say, for no one is that much of an island unless they interact with no one. And further, even their chosen names, the pics they use of themselves, their picks and groups will reveal some of the nature of the their RL - fantasy or not. For our fantasy life is still us, not something separate we can just tear off a page and insert elsewhere in another book.

What we are lacking in this modern world are any more coping skills then our ancestors had 100 years ago, and yet we have 1000 times more stimulus to cope with. Our psyche needs to catch up to our technological world, and this immersion experience is another realm our poor coping skills have yet to develop the proper mechanisms for self preservation.

These polaroids of which you speak, is this a new fangled invention?

When I say that my SL and my RL are separate, that means that I would prefer that the relationships I have here stay in the context of the game and I have no desire to overshare. Of course people share things about their RL lives, such as family illnesses, job troubles, occupation, etc. But that doesn't mean that we are going to socialize outside of SL.

But that "rule" is not inflexible. There are only two people in SL that I'd care to socialize with beyond the confines of SL, and one of them where I do. I've never met this person but we have talked on the phone, and I consider them a good friend in real life. But then, I have many acquaintances but trust few people in real life to call them friends.

That would be brilliant if that is what your profile says. Does it? I haven't logged on to see if it does. But a sole pronouncement that there is the SL/RL separation leads to the following questions unless you presuppose that others can read between the lines, which I can not do:

Do you really see SL as just a game? And, when you log off, SL relationships are just washed from your memory? Somehow you can box up your thoughts and feelings and close the door on them when you log off? If not, then what does it mean to keep them in the context of "the game?"

Just curious, and I may be missing your point altogether, no insult intended. And, anyway, don't I get to keep at least one pet peeve?

It happens a lot, hes probably married with 10 kids and his wife busted him.....
; (



move on....

BTW I knew my guys last name the week I met him.. but it was another month or so before we knew each others addresses, and we have even worked up a "what if" in case something happens to either of us....

Now I suppose if it went really really wrong, he or I could fake death... But that is not something I would ever do as karma is a bitch... and I'd hate to.... you know...