The distance of romance: Is online romance possible?

Newsweek's story this week, about two Second Life users who met and fell in love without a nasty breakup, divorce, murder or any other sort of common human drama has sparked a lot of talk among users of virtual environments about love and romance over a distance.

Opinions are divided of course. Some feel that it's impossible to fall in love with someone who is out of range of a slap in the face, while others see it as completely natural. Are human relationships like electro-magnetism, where they cannot exist beyond a certain small physical radius?

Two example people, Alice and Bob are in the same physical room. If they don't kill and eat each-other to survive (because we've got them locked in there), and they're generally compatible, then there's no particular reason why love shouldn't be able to blossom.

Separate them with a glass wall, so that they can see and hear each-other, but not touch. That might prevent smooching and such, but does it make that much of a difference?

Now soundproof our glass wall. They have to type, or talk on a telephone or via something like Skype. Does that really change things?

Let's make that an opaque wall. Alice and Bob are in different, adjacent rooms, but can see each-other via a webcam or (say) avatars in a 3D virtual environment.

Now we move one of them to the other side of the world.

Where do we draw the line and say that friendship or love between Alice and Bob becomes impossible?

My great-grandmother communicated with her husband-to-be for years. By post, with 6-8 weeks delivery time each-way. They met the day before the wedding. Nobody thought that was odd, peculiar or unusual. Until relatively recently with the advent of high-speed global travel and far higher population-densities, falling in love via postal mail was not uncommon.

Yet these days, many think that the idea of falling in love over such distances is a bit odd, which is quite a newish sort of a notion. That's not to say that forging or maintaining a long-distance relationship is easy. Just as in face-to-face relationships, they may not last. Those that make it through the first six months, though, have a real shot at it.

Second Life has had so many users that even an almost infinitesimal percentage of incidents of romance amounts to quite a few in absolute numeric terms. I've seen romances between people go right and go wrong. I've met someone and fallen in love myself (and yes, we got together offline, and it has been going swimmingly for a couple of years now, thank-you very much).

Over the last few years I've met quite a number of Second Life users in person (more than I'd ever expected to), and they're not any different to the person I got to know via Second Life. They're a whole lot easier to hug but otherwise no different in any important detail whatsoever.

And that's far more than I can say for quite a number of people whom I've only known offline.

I suppose then, you can put me in with the folks who see it as completely natural. How about you?

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.