Originally published at Blogging Monique Renae. Please leave any comments there.
I met my husband online.
Yes… on the computer. The same thing I use to write my posts.
The same place where I have met so many amazing females who will be ‘aunts’ to my kids.
When I speak to people about these women who have become personal friends of mine, the women I chat with occasionally on the phone, or even the ones I hope to someday meet, no one gives me a cautionary tale about being careful. No one tells me they could be a psycho murderer who has bad intentions.
However, when I mention that I met my husband on the interwebs I get looked at like I have lost my mind. I get asked a million and one questions as if what I am saying is the craziest thing in the world. This morning on the radio, I listened to a DJ tell a woman she was crazy for wanting to meet someone she met online who she had been talking to for over a year. It really pissed me off. I had a woman once tell me I was lucky to be alive because my husband could have killed me.
Why is it assumed that if you meet someone online they are:
- married
- not the person they claim to be
- an ax murderer
- a pedophile
- not in their right mind
Do these issues not apply to people we meet on a day-to-day basis? I see people everyday who scare me a lot more than someone I spoke to in a chat room. And I am certain serial killers DO lurk in local bars and churches not just online. How many of those high profile murders we have heard of in recent years involved a relationship that started online? I Googled ‘online relationship murder’ and got a bunch of hits for the murder of a young man by his co-worker. And that murder was because they both were supposedly involved with the same woman online.
The guys who consistently beat my ass and made me feel like trash were men I met at church, outside my house, at the grocery store.
Granted, in the many years of me meeting and talking to different people online, I have only ever encountered one mental case. He and I were just casual friends and he gave me some sob story about his wife recently dying. He was having a hard time coping and so he appreciated my friendship… that’s what he said. Months passed with me calling him and talking to him through his grief. Nothing unusual happened. And then one day he called me drunk as hell slurring some words and then hung up. He came online and was making threats and saying he was going to hurt himself so like any friend would, I called him.
His wife answered the phone.
His dead wife answered the phone.
Mind you, she was not mad at her husband when I told her everything I knew about the situation since according to her she already knew he was telling people she was dead. I wasn’t the first, and I wouldn’t be the last. And then she laid every ounce of the blame on me for pursuing her husband. No matter how many times I said I did not want her man she would not hear it. I ended up hanging up on her and for a few weeks after that she emailed me nasty letters and called my house like we were 15 year old’s fighting over the high school hunk.
So that’s one case out of over a hundred people I have met in the past 20 years.
Out of the 10 or so men I have met and dated out in the real world, only 2 were who they claimed to be. Six of them abused me in some form or another. Two of those six enjoyed hitting and verbally assaulting me. Seven of them cheated on me.
Maybe I am just naive.. or stupid… I don’t know… But I really need someone to explain to me what makes online relationships so taboo. Why are we labeled crazy when it usually turns out that your new husband, the love of your life, the man you met in college who is doing so well in his new FBI position is really some deranged man living a double life working at the gas station in the next town up to his eyeballs in debt and porn and currently plotting your murder?
