How are you? I am good and I hope you are. We are experts at chatting, aren't we? I decided to say I am sorry to you, for you may not have understood our last session chatting together in which I sounded like maybe I was spreading doom and gloom to you, negativity about chatting experiences and going off to meet others face-to-face who are a great distance away. Only to find out lies and misrepresentations prevented me from seeing I would never have wanted to go that distance if I had seen the reality of the person. Such a thing has never happened to me yet.
I wrote Troubled About Chat Advice in 2000 for a Web site and I described in it how I went about meeting a Tara from the eastern side of this state. In that article, I didn't describe the results of meeting her, other than noting we had felt safe and lived through it. Indeed, each of us felt we had a stellar first-rate-partner relationship, from the time we met online until only a slight time after physically touching. ...The problems began:
As I said to you, travelling a distance is risky to meet a stranger who might be packed with disillusionment, despairment. And Tara took that risk by coming to meet me in 2000. Yet, neither of us was dissatisfied with who we found the other to be....we felt the other was who he or she said, or even better than our own diminished self-esteems allowed us to descibe (remember I have discussed this with you). So what was the problem? Tara mislead herself that the disputing between us after meeting face-to-face was over my dissatisfaction of the real Tara compared to the tv-screen Tara. But I wasn't too happy about wondering when I was going to meet Tara in person again, and again, causing tension in me beside my desires, not dissatisfactions.
If only the time of the situation I had known I could "keep" (not own! but remain with!) her.
--J.L.G.