Thread was tl;dr for me, sorry, but I get the general gist of it and will be keeping an eye on the blog. I wish you the best of luck Doc, I remember most of the drama from beforehand and have an idea of what you've gone through. Regardless, online relationships, for me personally, just aren't real, and trust me, I've done a lot of them. You can't KNOW that you love someone, no matter how much you WANT to believe you do, unless you've spent substantial amounts of time in physical contact. There's just no other way around it. You can have a great emotional and intellectual bond with someone, but at that point, it's just all infatuation and all imaginary ideas, you can never truly know what the other person looks like on the other side of that wall, you don't know what they feel like, what they smell like, what they taste like. The same connections that make true, physical, factual, undeniable love are all gone from an online relationship, you just have a love for the idea of who they are. Doc, I want to wish you the best of luck, but, just watch out man, don't let your heart get too set into something like this mate. You two should take it REALLY slow, NZ is a pretty damn expensive trip, so obviously this seems like a fucking looney idea, but don't throw the love word around yet, you don't even know if this chick is a fucking slob, or she's as big as a hump back whale and needs you to cart her ass around in a wheel barrell, or if she farts in bed, or if she all of a sudden doesn't like some of the stuff that you do and you run out of date ideas. Please, for me at least Doc, seeing as we're old pals, just keep your emotions a little distant for the beginning, k?
at 55 i have a clue or two...she is also my age. We spend about 5 hours a day together in voice/webcam while in game the last nine months..also I was friends with her for two years before that. We have discussed much. We know each other intellectually very well. You do have some good points..we are both very aware of them. We have talked this through many times. Its one reason we are taking two months of real life time to get to know each other better in Real life. We are aware that it might not work out and have made plans for that too...it'll just be a nice holiday in that case.