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"I was, frankly, zapped when, one day, he asked me, 'Would you like to get married in cyberspace?'

"I mean, it's like this. He wasn't a regular on the chat site I go to -- once the two of us got together, we made our own private space so we wouldn't waste a single minute we could snatch. But I hang out in there when he is not around, I have friends there. And, though I would never have asked him to do something like this, deep in me there was a longing that he would, in front of them all, stand up to acknowledge our relationship. I guess, maybe, there was a part of my mind that, when my friends teased about where he was, wished that I could show them that relationship this was more than the Net's equivalent of a snatched roll in the hay...

"He told me later that I was stupid. That if I wanted it, wanted a proper marriage ceremony, I should have told him right then and there. That was when he made the point about the tricky part of this relationship. We are not live here. We don't have expressions of the other person to read, body language to observe, silences to evaluate. All we have is a computer apiece. And the words we exchange through it. Which means that we have to tell the other person everything!

"That's one thing I guess anyone who is in any sort of relationship at all on the Net needs to remember -- there are only words... and you have to use them to do everything for you. They have to substitute for your expressions, for your body language, for your silences, everything.

"So now, if I am smiling when I am telling him something, I post a 'smile'; if what I am telling him is something particularly tender, I might make that 'soft smile'; if I am annoyed, it is 'hands on hips' and so on. The Net has evolved a whole body language all its own, reducing to anagrams the actions we routinely perform when we are interacting with people in real life. And those, for me and him and people like us, substitute for the live input.

"Anyway, when he asked if I wanted to get married, I asked him what about his decision to never get married in real life. He told me then, that he had already gone back on one such decision -- never to get involved with another person. And that, now that he was more than involved, now that he was in love with me, he was committed all the way and this was merely a manifestation of that commitment.

"So then, we fixed a date and time that was mutually convenient. We sent mails to all our friends, naming the venue -- a private room we had created -- and, well, came the day and the square face of my computer terminal became, for me and him and all who were there, a beautiful little chapel in which two people acknowledged their love for, and commitment to, one another.

"A commitment that, as far as he and I are concerned, is for keeps!"

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