Sub Chat: Internet dumping grounds.

Tonight I went to the Second life forum and listened in to the Sub chat regarding relationships and the power of emotions in internet role-play. Too many complaints of dishonest or transient avatars disregarding the real feelings of others over the internet. In fact the ability to own multiple logs and avatars enables people to develop a throw away culture of handling relationships in SL. Even I have experienced this culture first hand May of last year, in my first experience in Second Life. A lady friend I had known from a different game had invited me to join her in SL so that we might have our avatars build a virtual life together. She seemed to take on the role of dominant female and so I followed her lead and moved more like a submissive switch. She had collard me in less then a week but it did not feel strange to me since we had known each other as friends for more then a year. She was working in SL as a manager of a dance club and this occupied at least 16 hours of every day. I have a career in real life so I would devote my free time, about 4 hour to log in and spend time with her at the SL dance club. Spending the majority of our time at the club I began to developed ways to interact with her so that she could function as manager and yet I could still entertain her. Less then a month passed and I was content with my role, even feeling safe as she had asked me to buy a kinky toy the day before. I came home that night to tell her of my adventure getting the toy only to find her in distress. She led me away from the club and told me that she did not deserve to own me and she felt it was best that she set me free. I was shocked and stunned with disbelief. I took the hint and stepped back to let her have some space only to discover a day later that she was engaged to be married in a week to the owner of the dance club. What I learned from this experience was that even while I was blind sided, I am tough enough to handle an emotional tragedy as this had been.