BBBC.3

Today's topic is a long and winding road: How hard do you think it is to find a relationship in SL? If you have an SL relationship, have you met in the physical world? Would you meet them? Do you think it would change your SL relationship if you met?

I think it is easier to find a relationship in SL than in RL, if you are looking for the kind of person who hangs around in SL, and very much harder if not. One reason is the absolute lack here of so many factors that work against possible relationships in RL. Your body makes so many decisions about people for you, without even bothering to let you know, based on smell or the way they walk or the shape of their face. There's none of that here, so the supply of possible relatees is exponentially higher, limited only by the compatibility of your souls.

Keeping the relationship going may be harder than in RL, due to distance and timezones and whatnot (someone you meet in a bar in RL is pretty well guaranteed to live in the same timezone as yourself).

I'm not sure how to answer the second question. I'm in a deep and very loving friendship with a woman here whom I have met in RL (long after we met here), and I think I'd say that meeting her in RL did strengthen that.

Meeting in RL is enormously risky, though: discovering that your SLove's meat avatar has hairy toes or a braying laugh brings down all the filtering that your body would have done for you in one fell swoop.