Finding love on the World Wide Web

Senior Alyssa Marzullo had never done anything crazy and unplanned in her life. But that didn't stop her from boarding a flight to Chicago O'Hare Airport early one morning last August to meet Jeff, the boyfriend she knew only through phone and online conversations.

Lost in O'Hare Airport, Marzullo felt her palms begin to sweat. Her stomach filled with butterflies as the doubts ran through her head. "My heart was beating in my throat. I was so scared that he was going to look at me and he wouldn't be who I thought he was," Marzullo says.

Suddenly, she spotted Jeff in the crowd. "Oh my God," she whispered. Five years of daily online conversations and a summer of all-night phone calls were finally coming to life amidst the neon signs and coffee shops of the airport.

The entire drive back to his house, they held hands.

The Internet holds the potential for romantic relationships like Marzullo's if teens handle their online crushes safely and responsibly, according to Susannah Stern, assistant professor of communications at the University of San Diego and a specialist in cyberculture. With 87 percent of American youth ages 12 to 17 now surfing the web, according to a Pew Internet and American Life Project report released on March 17, the Internet is becoming an integral part of teen culture. For a handful of Blazers, love and its hardships aren't found in the crowds of Blair Boulevard, but rather within the short-wire circuits and luminescent glows of their computer screens.

Just a click away

For sophomore Raquel Johnson, Cupid's electronic arrow struck three years ago, when she started instant messaging (IM-ing) Parker, a boy who lives in Nebraska. After two years of logging on for love, the two decided to become an online couple.

Johnson chose to wait in order to be sure of Parker's identity. She grew to trust him because he kept the same personality - she could tell if he enjoyed cracking jokes, if he was clingy and what his school and home life were like from their online conversations. The two also exchanged photos, and Johnson spoke with Parker and his mother on the phone.

Stern advises teens to perform identity checks like Johnson's, such as keeping up a long-time correspondence and talking to their online love interest's parents on the phone, before they reveal too much about themselves. "Teens shouldn't give out personal, identifying information until they've developed some standard of trust for themselves that this person is who they say they are," Stern said in a phone interview on April 4.

Once the identity question has been answered, though, Blazers in online relationships agree there are many benefits to getting to know someone through IM. Marzullo notes the strong communication that develops in an online relationship due to the absence of physical ties.

Johnson also recognizes the advantages inherent in an attraction based completely on personality rather than appearances. "It gives you a relationship where you're sure the only thing you have isn't lust," she says. While the friendship and attraction between her and Parker continues to build, Johnson can be sure things won't get physical with her online boyfriend as long as their relationship remains strictly on the web.

Some online relationships will remain platonic when taken offline, while others will become physical. For Marzullo, online conversations were just a stepping stone to physical attraction and a greater love offline that she would not have found if she had never typed that first "hello."

Laughing out loud

Since their first meeting last summer, Marzullo and Jeff have met four times: over Homecoming weekend, winter break, semester break and spring break. The two have been able to work around the fact that Jeff lives in Illinois; as long as his trips don't interfere with his schoolwork, Jeff's parents have no qualms with him arranging a flight to Maryland. In Marzullo's house, things are stricter: Her parents want to know "all the nitty-gritty details," she says.

But once the logistics are worked out and the money earned - Jeff and Marzullo buy their own plane tickets - it's off on another flight any chance they get.

Thanks to their frequent visits, Marzullo isn't the only person Jeff now knows in Maryland; he quickly made friends with Marzullo's whole social circle. Instead of attending this year's Homecoming dance, Marzullo held a large crab feast at her grandmother's house in honor of Jeff's first visit.

The reception Jeff received from Marzullo's parents, though, wasn't as open. "They think I'm gonna waste my life and ruin my opportunities with someone who isn't here," she explains.

But soon, Jeff will be nearer to Marzullo, thanks to the plans they are making to continue their relationship after high school. After she graduates, Marzullo will attend Alvernia College in Reading, Pennsylvania. Jeff plans on transferring from his current college in Illinois to be closer to her. Again, Jeff's parents are accepting of the idea. They're prepared to pay for his tuition, no matter where he goes.

Not all online relationships follow the happy course of Marzullo and Jeff's, however. When senior Heather Baker's online relationship took a turn for the worse, it was too late for her to log off.

Unplugging the cord

Although Baker's former online boyfriend, Bryan, lived 500 miles away in Michigan, he still managed to exert control over her life through phone and IM conversations, destroying her self-esteem and her parents' trust in her judgment.

Baker now realizes that she never would have let her relationship with Bryan become as destructive as it did had it developed out of face-to-face interaction. "I told him a lot of things about me that I wouldn't tell other people. I thought, 'Hey, I don't know this guy and he doesn't know my friends, maybe it's okay to tell him these things,'" she says.

Baker found it difficult to recognize the warning signs of an abusive relationship when they took shape on the Internet. "I didn't see it would harm me. If it's physical, there's eminent danger and there are ways you can physically get yourself out," she explains. "When you're online or on the phone, you don't see the harm it's going to do to you, but it really can hurt you."

Bryan initially drew Baker in with compliments, telling her that he loved her. But after they decided to become a couple, Baker says, the compliments stopped. Bryan became jealous and possessive. He wanted to know "every aspect of [her] life," became angry when she talked about her other male friends and persuaded her to have phone sex with him, says Baker.

Bryan was a hypocrite: He didn't follow the rules he set for his girlfriend. "He'd tell me that he cheated on me because I wasn't pretty enough for him and then have me come back to him after he apologized," Baker says.
The first people to notice the effect Bryan's treatment was having on Baker were her parents. "They saw a visible change in me. They saw I was more disobedient, argumentative, obstinate. And that's when they said I wasn't able to talk to [Bryan] anymore," she recounts.

But their restrictions meant nothing to Baker. She sneaked onto the computer in the afternoons to talk to Bryan and ran up a $680 phone bill calling him when her parents weren't home. Each time they caught her, fights broke out in her house, shattering the trust she had built with her parents in the past - a trust Baker is sure she could have preserved if both she and her parents had met Bryan in person before the situation got out of hand.

But that trust was already lost and with it, the focus of Baker's life. Her grades started to drop from As and Bs to Cs and Ds. "I started to plan my entire life around what [Bryan] wanted: what college I would go to, where I would live, how many kids I would have. I had handed my entire life over to someone I had never met," says Baker.

Eventually, though, Baker started to compare the uncaring way Bryan treated her with the way her other male friends acted towards her. She had an "awakening" and realized that she needed to break up with Bryan. "I told him I was sick of lying to my parents, that I was sick of him lying to me and that I wanted it to end," she says.

Baker thought that she finally was rid of Bryan, but in March, Bryan contacted her through e-mail for the first time in two years. He told her that he was getting married but that he wished they could "have something like [they] had before."

Baker refused to let him back into her life. "Why is he doing this to me? Why is he trying to pressure me again?" she wondered. "I'm not gonna let him get under my skin."

Reflecting on her experiences, Baker realizes that her sense of fear was in part because of the uncertainty that is inherent in any online relationship. "Basically, you could be dating a stranger. For all you know, that person could be telling you all lies," she says.