Boys I Met Online...

Once upon a time, I was a 14 year old girl who was in love with the Internet.

My first passion, I logged onto my hotmail account as soon as I could every morning at school as we didn't have Internet access at home. Throughout my formative high school years I was nicknamed "webjunkie" by close friends.

In homeroom, one day while surfing the web, I discovered Paddynet. Paddynet.com started out as paddynet.ie, if memory serves, and went through too many incarnations of the name through the last 14 years to remember them all.

Paddynet opened up my world to 'my friends in the box' as I like to call them. Hundreds of chatters from USA stateside, to all over Canada - Montreal, BC- to yes, encompassing even the UK and Ireland. Most of my 'boys' came from Paddynet or were linked there somehow.

The first boy I ever chatted up really wasn't ever a boy. A man in his mid 30's, his handle online was "Ghostman" and he frequently went by the handle "Lurker". Funny thing, that... I was 17 by the time I started going on with him -- his real name was Glenn and he lived in the UK - he was an assistant English prof at the University of Oxford. How do I know this for sure you ask? Well, we exchanged addresses and wrote each other 'smitten letters' as I termed them. I usually emailed him, but I also sent snailmail to his home and to his office address. He always got them. *shrugs*

From Glenn, I learned that I had a thing for older men. A fetish almost. Older men were more willing from my experience to take things slowly and devoted more time to conversation than keep repeating the words 'wanna cyber?' over and over again. There was actually substance beneath the talking.

We corresponded for a few months outside of online life. Sadly, any budding relationship was squelched by my conscience in reality and online not meeting up. I was 17. He was much older. I figured it was illegal somehow and we quit the 'smitten talk', but remained friends for many years.

Then there was Dale. Also known as "Gunshy" in Paddynet world. Yup, I lost my cyber virginity to him. Sadly, he wasn't even worth it. Turns out he was cybering behind my back with another female chatter that went by the handle "Shy". Go figure.

My next man I met online was Kerry. His online name was "Yrrek" and he played on my sense of confusion being a 17 year old teenager. Kept saying we were soul mates, and how he wanted to take me away from it all. He also mis-represented himself as being in his early 20s. I seriously got sucked into his act... too much of a mind-f*ck to go into here about, but at least for my graduation I got a $100 from him. Huh. Never did I ask for a thing but to meet. The one time we talked on the phone, my parents threatened to look him up, and he disconnected quite quickly. That signaled the end of the fantasy - he turned out really to be a 46 year old man in sheep's clothing.

After that, I had graduated high school, recovered, and was trying to fit into life at the U of MN in Morris. That's where I ended up spending 20 hour days in the computer lab when my 386 PC couldn't handle the strain of the constant refreshing, and they didn't have Ethernet cards those days for laptops.

My taste in bad men continued on to meeting "SkankinPickle" (it's the name of a defunct ska band) online in Paddynet. We flirted, and danced around things. It turned out he was 21 to my 18, lived in Missouri, and we began. We talked on the phone several times a day in my dorm room. He snailmailed me a letter asking if I would be his girl. I couldn't contain my joy. Of course I said yes. We spent a month dancing around meeting, when he asked if he could come out to visit. We figured things out and made arrangements. No, I didn't lose my virginity on that visit.

I lost it when I went to visit him about 2 weeks after he'd been to see me, and after he'd proposed. After spending a week with him in Missouri, I flew back to MN, and started packing my stuff. He flew back to MN to help me pack everything, and we drove to St. Louis, MO. I spent the next 6 months living in sin until we married in Sept of 1998. Our divorce became final in December of 2002.

Having a small child, and no help around me in the form of a spouse or partner, definitely curtailed my online activities. I mainly kept in touch with my good Paddynet friends -- people that I'd know since I was 16 years old, people that had sent wedding gifts to Pickle and I when we were married -- Spacy, Cleo, Ettie, Treps, Pru, Pegs, Catcii, and others. As Alli grew into a toddler, only then did I allow myself to dare trust myself again in attempting anything.

Relying on the love and support of my online family, I soldiered on. This time I started with an interest in a man in CA. A reporter named - of all things - Kerry. A nice guy, we got along like a house on fire, but after a few rousing phone calls we realized that despite it all, we were going to remain just friends.

A boy - desperate for attention - from Florida who worked in a deli. Willing to take a bus trip here to MN... from FLORIDA. After only talking about a week on the phone, he wanted to marry me. Nice kid. Turned verbally abusive when I turned him down. Good thing I did.

Willem, from the Netherlands, is still one of my good friends. A lifelong survivor of CF (Cystic Fibrosis) we clicked... and he still holds a special place in my heart still, but the distance and with us both being poor, we decided it for the best to remain friends.

I took a long break after Willem. I was doing in home daycare at the time and was being pursued (yes, seriously, my chubby ass was being targeted!) by one of the single dads whose 3 children I watched daily. It was enough to put a woman off looking for a long, long time.

Macparland is Irish to the core, a first generation Irish-American, he can tell you anything you want to know about the old country, his endless hockey games (he's played on two teams seasonally), his job working for a huge bank in the East as a key player (although he's too modest to say anything), and will always treat a lady with courtesy and respect. Still he has that twinkle in his eye to make you wonder. And with that shock of white hair... let's just say I had a horrible, insanely awful crush on the poor man for a few years. He dealt with it well. We've snailmailed, talked on the phone...met in person and I was finally able to give him a hug even if it wasn't the seduction I had planned in May 2004 for the Dubliner get together... but hey. He turned out to be my best friend during those few years. And I'll always care for him for that, and how he never failed to treat me as less than someone he respected.

When I had finally grown up, over Mac, I met Baltiman through my good friends Treps and SadPuppy. Baltiman was in his late 30s, a project manager for Siemens in the UK, and wholly stable, and utterly adorable. Within 2 weeks of us starting chatting online, he had proposed how he could come to visit Alli and I... and then we could make Sadpup's and Trep's wedding together. It was honestly, my first real, adult relationship. I'm quite sure he didn't know exactly how to handle someone who was 15 years younger than he, but he did a fine job. We ended up mutually agreeing after a year and a half together long distance that although we loved each other, it wasn't the right kind of love. We remained somewhat friends... but I haven't heard from him in ages.

This now brings us to Spring/Summer 2004. I decided to be adventurous and join EHarmony. What a waste that was. I met a guy - a programmer for the state of Florida, James, a few years older than me; within 2 days of our first conversation on the phone he had bought a ticket to see me without asking me. Then he started calling, constantly, and while he was playing Ultima Online. Yes, it was SO much fun listening to him breathe. I finally deleted the screen shots he sent me of his character in the game. Nerd? No. Desperate Nerd? Maybe.
After another 5 days of phone calls back and forth, I had had enough one night and told him not to call anymore, and to cancel his plane ticket. There was an incident involving Alli crying for my attention and him saying "Is all she ever does cry?" That pissed me off to no end, and I told him "If I wasn't on the f*cking PHONE all the time, I could actually devote more attention to her!" And then I told him to cancel everything. And hung up. And to think, that night before the incident had happened, he had asked me to marry him and move to Florida. Not bad for knowing a guy about a week, eh.

I blocked his phone number. I emailed him my apologies and told him I no longer wanted his attentions and I got the meanest, nastiest emails back. One after another.
Then I blocked his emails.

The next man I met online is one that, unfortunately, deserves his own blog posting because he royally screwed me up. BAD. However, because he and his wily "pron" ways so affected me, I am going to be choosing NOT to relive them in blog. I've bored y'all enough with this crap anyways. I just felt the need to cleanse myself of all those who have come before Dave.

Ahhh... I feel like that was cathartic. I feel... better.