What is love? There is usually not a single universal answer to such a question. Every living creature feels a different attachment to the idea of love. Some people fall in love in order to love, and some people love in order to fall in love. Some people break up in order to love, and some people start being together in order to love. Today, we focus on the idea of loving someone you have never met physically in person. Today, we focus on the idea of loving someone that you may not be able to touch directly. In this article, we focus on the concept of love and people online, with the people online meaning people you have never yet met in person physically in the offline world.
Today, we ask the question: Can you fall in love with someone online?
Your hosts today are Bes and Katie.
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Bes
Yes, you can fall in love with someone online.
However, simply being able to fall in love with someone online does not mean that the love is real, or that your views about the validity of what love is are real. Also, another question to ponder about would be: Should you fall in love with someone online?
In order to love someone online or offline, you may want to know what love is.
What is it about love that one pursues? Is it the loneliness, where one focuses on their own desolate desperation in order to simply be locked into a chain with someone else and feel needed? Is it obsession, blinding you from what is really going on and simply thrusting you into being attached to someone else simply to remove your own insecurities? Regarding online love, if we can part ways physically for a few hours with our love so that he or she can go to work or the movies, can the same concept be extended into loving someone online that we have never met?
If we have only loved offline so far, how can we know our feeling or emotion online is love?
Whether it is any of the above reasons, or pure, unharmful and sincere love, the next main question to ask is what you expect to gain from the love connection you may have or feel with someone online. Do you plan to meet that someone physically? Do you wish to continue being connected to that someone virtually? If you can answer the above questions directly, or at least sincerely, and can be curious about them, you can have better chances of falling in love with someone online for the right reasons, and also with the right person. By a “right person“, I am implying a person that may be willing to love back sincerely also, and not a person that many people assume to be the life-long partner.
Simplicity of saying or typing “I love you” may make you think you love someone online.
Online, it is simply easy to say “I love you.” Three words seem to be the focus of many people instead of the meaning that those three words bring. Typing something on a keyboard while feeling a bit hyper can be a completely different emotion than actually being present in front of someone and feeling and saying the same things. That is one of the reasons falling in love with someone online, while not impossible, may be very risky. Such a feeling of falling in love with someone online may be very risky because you may assume that having emotions for someone online may be equal to the feelings of mental and physical attraction you can have for offline people in person, and that you do not care about any physical distance between you and the online person you feel you are in love with.
Thus, in my view, it is possible to fall in love with someone online because of our own feeling of love being sincere in our mind. At the same time, other elements, like the target or our love or elements affecting our love, may actually negate the overall love effect or constitute actual harm and a feeling of fake love and emotion.
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Katie
NO, it is not possible to fall in love online.
AH, LOVE WHAT A WONDERFUL THING
What is love? Better yet, what is true love? Every person on this planet desires some form of love, either from family, friends, or a lover. However, the quest to find it these days has gone to a greater extreme than ever before. Nowadays people are searching for their companions over the internet. Websites like Match.com and Eharmony.com promise to find that special someone. It is convenient and easy to look for a partner from the comfort of your own home. However, looking for someone online is not the answer to solving the riddle of love. Today I will be examining why one cannot fall in love (or at least true love) with someone online.
LOOKING FOR LOVE ONLINE
In the fast pace world we live in finding a companion is not easy. Often times we turn to the internet for help. So many dating websites are there at our fingertips. Men and women make profiles and add pictures in hopes of finding a husband or wife, a relationship, a companion, or just to date. This noble quest of finding your princess or prince charming is done by scrolling through page after page of men and women, as if they were a sweater you saw online and you were searching for that right color and fit. People are not garments to be bought online; relationships are not something that should be created and developed online. Finding love is something that cannot and should not be found online.
HOW CAN REAL LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS BE FORMED WITH SOMEONE YOU’VE NEVER MET?
How is it possible to fall in love with someone whom you’ve never even met? How is it that someone you’ve never seen, never touched, never kissed or hugged, never conversed with, never lived with, become someone you love? A relationship takes, and should take plenty of time to develop by spending time with each other, get to know one another, and doing activities together. Love that is online has none of these qualities. A computer screen is the thing you are looking at, not the eyes of a person. You cannot receive a hug from your computer monitor, nor feel the tender touch of holding hands through your keyboard. The world of technology is an amazing thing, but not for dating or meeting people.
IT’S AN INFATUATION NOT LOVE.
The so-called love that people experience online is nothing more than an infatuation, puppy-love, or just plain lust. Real love cannot be formed online. The feelings one gets by experiencing a relationship of romantic type interest online, is only that of excitement. The newness and fun of a potential relationship is what gets people thinking they have or are finding “The One.” The joy they get by seeing that person appear online, or that offline message sent is a joy that should be experienced by seeing them in person or a hand-written note left for you. Love is not something to be played with, especially online.
TRUE LOVE CAN BE FOUND IN THE PEOPLE WE SEE EVERYDAY
In my heart I feel that to find the love we desire, we need to look no further than to those we meet and see every day. Our mother and father, sisters and brothers, friends, and acquaintances can enrich our lives, fill them with love, and make our hearts full of joy and happiness. These are real people we can touch and hug, really laugh out loud with, and create real smiles with, not just the round, yellow smileys on online chats. Love can be found in the world, we just need to get away from our computer monitors and go out and find it.
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So there it is. Bes feels that it is possible to fall in love with someone online, along with several outcomes and reasons that must be kept in mind in order to realize whether or not such a “love” is real or not, or effective. Katie feels that is is not possible to fall in love with someone online because falling in love with someone online is actually infatuation in disguise.
What do you think? Do you think it is possible to fall in love with someone online that you have never met? Have you ever felt love towards someone online? Please share in the comments below.
Thank you for reading! 
We really appreciate your time and comments.
I think the question ought to be rephrased since you both approached it as a “purely online” kind of love. In my case, I did fall in love with a woman I met online. Granted, the online courtship was relatively short – only a couple of weeks – because we were fortunate to live within driving distance of one another. Once we met in person, we became virtually inseparable and, more than ten years later, remain so. We’ll be celebrating our six year marriage anniversary in a couple of months and, next month, we’ll be celebrating the first birthday of our child. And, yeah, we have our ups and downs, but we both feel our relationship is rock solid. We’ve been through A LOT together – sudden death of a parent, long bouts of unemployment, severe financial troubles – and we remain stupid for each other.
I tend to think we’re the exception to the rule, in some ways. I know too many couples who have split up over the kinds of things we can either talk out or laugh off. Some of them have met online, but most have met in “traditional” places. The bottom line is you never really know where your heart will take you unless you commit to following it.
Now, more to your point of falling in love with someone you’ve never met – while I think it’s possible, I don’t think it can be called “real” until you’ve spent time together in person. Chat rooms, email, IMs and online games all have the ability to strip people down to their personal essence. I think you can fall in love with the core of that person through your communication with them. I started falling for my wife before I ever saw her face simply because of the way we connected through email and the phone. And when we first met in person, it was awkward, weird, fumbling… frankly, I’m surprised we’re still together. Fortunately, we were able to eventually find that connection again in the real world. In fact, our ability to connect with one another in so many dimensions is why I think we’ve been able to weather the storms we’ve faced.
Consider the married couple that, at middle age, suddenly find they are no longer the same people they were when they met. If they can’t reconnect, they become dissatisfied, and that dissatisfaction can lead to splitting up. People are constantly changing, and it’s possible for two people who were in love ten years ago to change in diverting ways so that they drift. There’s a distinct possibility that may happen to my wife and I – who knows what tomorrow brings – but I tend to believe our ability to reconnect may save us that heartache.
So finding love online, in my eyes, is not much different than finding it anywhere else. Whether it really is love or not is determined by a number of factors. I know married couples who met in more traditional ways who eventually split up because they discovered that, really, they weren’t in love – they were just infatuated with one another. Human emotions are a sticky, messy business. I think the online world complicates it more than it should be, but, certainly, finding love online is a real possibility that can potentially lead to a lifetime of happiness.
Rob Z., thank you Rob for the detailed comment.
You are right, our question can be rephrased and simplified even further, to focus solely on the online experience without any physical contact with the other person.
That is indeed a very interesting and nice story to run into. You can surely consider yourself to be an exception to the usual trends of today, because many people do tend to realize that there are problems that they either ignored before or that they failed to realize earlier in the relationship.
At the same time, the very concept of typing and communicating online may indeed, like the word you used, “strip” down the feelings that can arise or change in person. Online, most of the feelings depend on how one types or communicates, and usually or so far, not much else. Body reactions, facial expressions, sounds, gestures, actual feelings, reaction due to the physical presence of someone around and the idea of realizing that now someone is actually physically present and will not disappear after the monitor is turned off, can all combine to create the actual effect of “falling in love” that can actually last a long time. “Falling in love” online may actually become the first stage, or even part of the fist few stages, to “falling in love offline” or “being in love.” What do you think?
Thanks again Rob! I hope and wish the best for you, your wife and your family!
agree with Bes.yes! we can falling in love with someone online.
you can’t fall in love with someone you have never met!!!!!!! Any intelligent person would know that. And if you think that you love someone you just know online then, you don’t know what love is and you are nieve and silly.
Thanks Angel!
And thanks also Maureen.
So you are saying that, in your view, you must meet a person physically in order to fall in love?
Hello, I think you can fall in love with the mental part of the person as I have since we have been chatting for one year now, in fact 15 months and are about to meet in two weeks time! Both of us feel a close friendship, in fact, more than friends but aware that we might not have a chemistry when we both meet. However, having said that, both of us want to give it a go. Although this is compounded by the fact that he is still married, going to counselling at her insistence when he told her he wants a divorce, which he says is not making him want to stay in the marriage. He still wants out. We both met onlne out of happiness with existing relationships. I left my husband due to a catalyst of him hitting my son, so that was the end of it. His situation is not as easy to get out of as he has two young boys, ages 3 and 5. However we both agree to remain friends whatever happens as we have a special bond in that way. 2.5 weeks now and counting down.
No i can’t … but i think i can flirt little bit… cant love… love is a deep emotion and i believe it is tangled with our familiarity and intimacy with other person.
Hey Meera
Thanks for the reply. What do you think of people who meet online and then in person?
The question is not whether you can fall in love with someone online, but if you do – what does it say about you and the place you’re in…
Thanks for the comment. Do you think falling in love with someone online is a bad thing (or inferior) compared to falling in love with someone offline?
Could falling in love with someone online signify signs of obsession?
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Reasons to love someone doesn’t matter on line or off line. What matters is making the steps possible to allow love to be.