We’re all familiar with the jokes about your online sweetheart turning out the be some old guy or teenage nerd, etc. etc.. And we laugh at the “horror” of discovering that your image is false. But surely there must be some stories where these odd couples in real life become friends/lovers despite that, and not just the ones involving people getting arrested for statutory rape. For reference, I’m thinking more along the lines of the relationship between Tsukasa and Subaru in the anime series .hack//Sign. That series is somewhat vague about what happens after they meet in real life, but clearly they did not recoil in horror at the discovery that they were both women, one confined to a wheelchair no less.
If indeed online relationships are real, then it is highly likely that eventually they are going to profoundly change the nature of real life relationships and what are and are not acceptable pairings. Indeed, the pair could conceivably cease to be the base unit.
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This is a bit of copy pasta of my comments on the Slashdot discussion of Regina Lynn’s Sex Drive commentary on Wired.