For those seeking love online, meeting someone is only half the battle. Just try sharing a romantic candlelight dinner across eighteen server hops! After you've clogged up each other's mailboxes with flirty email and gotten tired of chat rooms and IRC channels, there are still plenty of ways o' wooing, short of hopping on a plane. Here are a few suggestions of creative places for online romancing.
If you're both running Windows (Mac and Windows users are, of course, totally incompatible personality types), an entire love affair can be built around PowWow, a free piece of software that facilitates not only live voice and text chat, but also collaborative doodling.
A great bonus of PowWow is its Web touring feature, which allows you to drag your date's Web browser over to Amazon and show off your wish list -- true e-window shopping. Or maybe you want to take her (or him) to an indie flick at iFilm.
If you want to play some games together (other than those of the romantic variety), no service is as simple and elegant as Yahoo Games. You'll need a Java-enhanced browser to play, but beyond that, there are no lengthy downloads before accessing the games, and they're free. Most games feature built-in chat windows for table talk, and you can establish a private game with your date and keep other trolling Romeos away from your Juliet (or vice versa).
Ready for a walk on the wilder side? Head to The Palace, a hallucinatory partyscape where chat is taken to a different, often bizarre level. After downloading the software, you and your date can dress up digital "avatars" — visual characters ranging from brunettes to bullfrogs. Once suited up, you can go wandering together through "visual chat rooms" populated by other avatars who'll bend your ear, lend you props, and maybe even invite you to one of the unofficial, private Palaces where anything can (and often does) happen. You’ve got to see this whole scene to believe it. If you don’t already have that special virtual someone, The Palace is great place to hook up. Of course, you never know if Dianne, the dancer from Carmel, is not Dave, the bouncer from Bridgeport, but after a while, you develop an intuition about such things (at least that’s what you tell yourself).
In online dating, the long-term goals are the same, but the means of getting there are new, often less obvious, and far from traditional. Suspension of disbelief and a shot of creativity can go a long way.
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