Falling in love with an avatar.

I will say yes you can fall in love with he person behind the keyboard, and that Avatar can help but its the person you fall in love with.. my recommendation is to take love very, very ..VERY slow. I only read up to here .. but its very easy to do it in SL... and it isn't good if you or they are not up front once those RL feelings are known.

\thanks Kaimi.i have just come back from spending some lovely time on sl with her,the 5 hour time difference makes it difficult at times but it's worth it
What we share on sl can only really be understood by those who are in the same type of love relationship,i have a few friends on sl who experience the same thing
It's amazing how we can become attached to our own avy,and of course to our love interest,my avy is me,i fuss over it to make it as beautiful as i can,always dress in lovely dresses
As i said we met outside (online)of sl,and sl is where we spend time together,and it is the verbal communication that can bring things to life,and if you both have vivid imaginations,well, the time together can be so satisfying
The os debacle is very troubling to us,we love our island,it is our romantic paradise,i have spent many hours building everything we enjoy, a road around the island where we race our motorcylcles and cars,we have helicopters and a lear jet and our home is a huge 4 story yacht,we hope to keep it but it will be much more than originally tier priced
I think on sl it is much better to be female,there are so many female things to choose from,one can transform ones self into a beautiful female avy
I don't know if anyone else is attached to their avy as i am,it is by extension,me,to me much more than just an avy

I think personally sometimes due to first life circumstances, it harder to connect with others
be it friends, family or potential lover...or things just don't work out.
Yet being human we need connections, we need to know someone cares, we need someone to love us. It is part of being human. Yet when two or more humans get together sometimes
it isn't always the best and most loving that comes out.
This can happen regardless of where you're hanging out and connecting with people.
If you spend a lot of time in SL or anywhere be it online or offline this will occur.
I don't know I never really experienced romantic love here and rarely in FL, but there are friends that I have known for long time almost the length of my existence as FD that I love and care about very much, I know care about me, not just my avatar but it doesn't mean there aren't rough patches. Usually those rough patches are due to internal causes.
I am guy in rl without all the matching parts, in SL my male bits are in my inventory and I don't think I will be rezzing them out again.
I am not Lesbian, I love and respect women but only platonic ways 99% of the time but it is okay if others feel more lustful towards women I am just not interested in females that way.

True but if two people love each other there is a huge responsibility that goes along with it,yes you are in love with their avy as well as the rl person,real feeling are involved here and a heart can be broken,and emotions devastated
Only a cold hearted person would start up with an avy and say things to lead them on only to tire and leave them alone,real emotions are involved and can be just as devastating as in rl
I have a friend who fell in love with an avy,at least i think they are ,i know they are very close but have never seen each other in rl,it is strictly an avy relationship
But they are happy

Well, some men really are jerks, others are children.

"She sees the man inside the child..." U2 - Mysterious Ways

Some jerks, some children, some __________________ ?

Let's fill in some positive adjectives.

Well, I'm in a SL relationship.. Never intended to be but..

One day almost a year ago a person showed up in a club I frequented. He immediately caught my attention from the way his non-human avatar looked. When I read his profile (RP-profile I might add, something I was never into) I was even more intrigued. The way he had designed his avatar combined with the profile made me very curious about the person behind the creation. As time went by we met regularly at that club, got to know each other and became friends. Then close friends. RL info was exchanged in time. He drifted away from RP and created a new account. We kept getting closer and kept discovering things we had in common. And finally we "tied the knot" in SL which people around us had been waiting for quite some time apparantly..

Do I love him? Absolutely. Have we met in RL? No. Will we ever? Oh God I hope so. Unfortunately we live on different continents, so patience is a virtue. Do we realise that meeting in RL may not turn out the way we hoped and expected? Yes... but I can not imagine not doing so, and thus never finding out what could have been.. I am one of those people who do have a hard time connecting to others, and that I would connect to someone the way I have with him.. it's mindblowing.

Okies, I'll start with some.

Some men are "Sexy".

Some men are "Kind".

Some men ARE from "Mars, so it's not their fault".

I've talked to some people on SL whose SL online relationship is now RL too. It doesn't happen every time, but I think one day you will have your time. We all want love, but to explain how and when love happens is one the great mysteries of the universe. But you cannot know unless you try and I see those so frustrated by this every day. Take deep breaths and keep talking to other friends. It might be RL chemistry or it might not? But for some, it has become real life.

I suppose someone could fall in love with an avatar but it is far better to fall in love with the person behind the avatar.

Yes, there are definitely real feelings involved and hearts can be hurt deeply (my own heart will attest to that). And nobody here should get involved with someone else without clearly stating their expectations of what kind of relationship they want.

I was being a tad sarcastic - but only a tad. Even getting to know the real person here and falling in love with the them that we know is still way different than actually being with them in RL and too many people do not realize that.

Interesting how this went...

Anyways let me say for the record that I do my best to not hurt feelings.
While I may lack some compassion for things I can't really see, I understand that some folks invest a lot of emotion and in RL I don't like hurting people.
I tell them upfront about things, who I am, how I feel...

I have felt emotion while on SL about a few things but it stays on SL.
And yes I have been slightly hurt.

Any time you get humans together and all their external and inner workings regardless
of what happens emotions, hurt feeling happen unless you're around human
beings who just don't feel and more like Spock.

I posted a blog not long ago on my yahoo 360,my purpose was to show those in long distance relationships in RL how getting together in SL can go along way to calm that emotional turmoil one can suffer being in love with someone they cannot be with due to various reason,
Many years ago i did probably the most stupid thing i have ever done,i fell in love with a married woman,at first things are wonderful but as the years pass and so many evenings are spent alone never knowing when you will see them next,it was a devastating relationship and the line between reality and fantasy gets very blurry,
We talk about an avy and how if we were to meet the person behind the avy we might be disappointed.
In the relationship i described, much the same happens,i spent so much time alone that the person i was in love with became more of a relationship in my mind,building her up to to be that perfect love to justify in my own mind why i would put myself though all the pain and suffering,but anyone who has been in such a relationship knows it feeds on itself and the line between fantasy and reality gets very blurry.

Long distance relationships can be extremely hard to endure but being able to get together in sl can go a long way to soothing the soul.
Through your avy you express those feeling of love,maybe it's all virtual but time spent together is very satisfying,hours on hours of doing different things together.
If one must be in a relationship where thousands of miles separate you then sl is a wonderful way to spend time together

Love affairs can be addictions.
When I was very young I spent three years of my life believing I was in love with a man who hurt me all the time. I was so desperate for the little bit of pleasure I sometimes felt with him that I just couldn't walk away. It actually seemed as if the more time I had invested in the relationship and the more pain it had caused me the more I needed to stick with it and hope it would all be worth it somehow.
Fortunately my capacity for suffering is pretty limited and once the limit was reached it was over. It left me feeling very small and worthless and angry and scared that I hadn't protected myself better.
It took me a year to build myself back up but at the end of that year I was a happier stronger person than I had ever been before. I've never again felt really hurt because what anyone else did or didn't do. (It was another 10 years before I finally found true love but they were happy years, in spite of ups and downs in luck and circumstances.)

As humans we can suffer tremendously and usually of our foolish doing,we justify it at the time.telling ourselves anything to survive a painful relationship,focusing on the positive points and pushing the negative out of the way,unfortunately there can be more negatives than positives and sometimes we put blinders on our reality,the more we invest emotionally into a painful relationship the harder it becomes to walk away from it and the more we keep fooling ourselves the deeper our emotional involvement becomes,it feeds on itself and feelings become more intense in the process
Everyone on the outside can see what we can't,we only see what we want to see to keep our sanity
But in the end we are forced to face reality,which is very painful,sadly from such intense emotional suffering we end up putting up defensive walls around our emotions
Time does heal,but we will never put ourselves in such a position again,we have learned, but paid so much to learn

*hugs*

for most of 2007 on through Apr 2008 i was in a job like this. i just knew it was going to get better so i didn't want to give up. before i knew it, i was emotionally broken. i finally had enough and took a leave of absense. (imagine this arrogant, aggressive woman being pushed off a ladder). it was ugly and i became quite ill because of the stress.

better now.

funny how these things slowly creep up and take over, isn't it?

Of course it's possible to fall in love with an avatar. It's just as possible as falling in love with a character in a book, and then being devastated when the author kills off that character. Just because the representation is fictional, that doesn't mean the emotions you invest in knowing that character are also fictional.

Exactly.



*Hugs 3* I'm pretty sure you're like me in the not-falling-for-the-same-thing-twice department. After all there are always new ways to get jerked around. Over the years I've become a lot more immune to all of them though (so far).



Good point.

YOu know what folks?
I feel like crap that I ever asked this.
I don't know what I was expecting but it kind of saddens me to read some of these responses. I admit I know what pian feels like, just like anyone.
My problem is when anyone tries to get too close to me in ANY world or context, I tend to shove them away.
So anyways thanks for responses and I am sorry if I stepped out of line.

/me whistles the theme tune from "I told you so . . ."

Pep (I try to help people, you see, Brenda, even when people don't realise they need it)

I didn't realise you had met me, Avawyn.

Pep (As Meatloaf sang "Two our of three ain't bad"

exactly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don't feel bad.you did'nt step out of line,the subject is very valid,falling in love with an avy can bring many different emotions,people can be hurt,the main message would to be always on your guard
As for the pain related here,that is over and done with,i am in love with my partners avy and the person behind the avy,we are on sl right now but i jumped over here and saw this
No the sublect is very valid and i am personally glad you brought it up,so many on sl do not know who is behind an avy,there are genuine people,also devious people
Just pity those who fall for a devious one

I'd have to agree w/ the OP, Kaimi and Skell

That's really sad. I don't think I could live that way but to each his own. We have all been burned at some point; it's how you deal that defines who you are. I eventually learned to love my scars; I know how it feels, and I take the plunge anyway. C'est la vie. YMMV and other such Peter Pan sayings.

Avatars are only a slice of the person behind them. They have the opertunity to remake themselves just as we do. Yes, it is easy to fall in love, be taken advantage of, played the fool, suckered out of your money, used as someone elses disposible plaything and laughed at as they walk away. SL does not have the monolopy on this. It happens in RL too. After all, ever relationship you have ever been in before has ended so your odds are sucky at best. In the end either the fears control you or you control them. There is no right or wrong in this, it's how you feel and what is, IS. No reason needed or validation required.