Yes, I met a woman online in late 1992, early 1993, before the world wide web, I had been accessing the internet at my college since fall of 1991 when only one other person in the world that I knew even knew what the internet was. He was a friend of mine from high school and he told me about this telnet site in Cleveland where we could go to chat and keep in touch. One day when I was in an IRC room at this site in Cleveland, I “met” this woman with whom I hit it off amazingly. We had a lot in common, at least on what I now realize is a very superficial level…basically similar tastes in music, humor, and other media consumption.
We began to chat online every night, then one day she called information, in every area code in Minnesota (I was in a small town in western Minnesota, and she was in Cleveland, OH) until she found me. We talked for 6 hours, and we both felt that we’d fallen in love. We knew very little about each other that wasn’t superficial and we’d never seen each other. We exchanged pictures via email, and she wasn’t “exactly” what I thought of as my type, but I’m really not that superficial of a guy and I decided that this was worth pursuing. When I graduated in May of 1993, I immediately made plans in June to drive to Cleveland and meet this person, she was also a college senior, my age, basically in her last year of school, but had to pick up a few more credits over the summer, so she was on campus at her school (where the telnet site was), and so she managed to get me a dorm room to rent for 3 weeks where she lived.
I was socially retarded and had never had a real girlfriend, so I was still a virgin when we met (I was 22) but that changed about 3 hours after I got there. My biggest problem was always shyness, and basically it was the first time a girl had made the first move (well, the first time a girl had made the first OBVIOUS move, I know now that at least one girl I really crushed on in high school was dropping hints left and right and I never picked up on them). She called me the first time, and between phone calls and letters over a few months, she got me extremely worked up so that there was no question what was going to happen when we met. The first week was great, the second week so – so and the third one downright scary at times. Long story short, she turned out to be an emotional basket case.