Not really a 'new' question. 'You've got mail' with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan was released back in 1998. Online dating sites have been around for years now.
Daniel Glattauer's book 'Gut gegen Nordwind' (English adaptation is entitled Love Virtually) was published in 2006. And it entirely made up of the email exchange between Leo Leike and Emmi Rothner. Because of a mistake in an email address, Emmi's email mistakenly ends up in Leo's inbox. And that's where it all starts. Trying to summarize what they write about it, is quite difficult. They don't tell each other much about their respective lives. We find out that Emmi is 'happily married' and that Leo has been in an on-off relationship for some years. But otherwise their communication is primarily flirtatious, raising the question whether they should or should not meet up.
As the English book title suggests, they of course fall in love. The book finishes without them ever having met up.
The sequel 'Alle sieben Wellen' (Every seventh wave) followed in 2009 and I won't give away what happens. I will say though, that I would love for Mr Glattauer to write a third final book about Emmi and Leo!
I enjoyed the writing style and couldn't put the books down as I wanted to find out what happened next. Especially in the first book, Emmi can be quite annoying though and I kept wondering why Leo bothers with her... Overall, I found their dialogues very 'German'. The message is very much linked with the writing style of both characters and I wonder how much of this gets lost in the English translations and also how non-German speakers perceive the story.
Quite some years ago, I had my own Emmi-Leo story. It didn't go on over months though, but just a week or so. Through an online portal (not a dating site), I started chatting to a guy who lived in the same city as me. We emailed several times daily and there was chemistry straight away. After a week or so, we talked on the phone for the first time. And it was amazing. He seemed perfect. Interesting, funny, charming with a great (phone) voice. I seriously thought I had fallen in love, with butterflies and all. We arranged to meet for dinner the next evening.
Well, I am sure you are guessing the outcome already... The meeting was very disappointing. I'm not entirely sure what the problem was. We had sent each other photos before the meeting, but it was still so different to see him in the flesh. It felt awkward. It felt awkward having been so flirty - with essentially a stranger. All the butterflies disappeared in an instant. Needless to say that we never saw each other again (and that he DIDN'T stay over).
On a professional level, I have had so many email/phone interactions with people, who - once I met them - turned out to be so different from what I had made them up to be in my head. I guess it comes down to the impact of visual cues in communication that are lost in email and phone communication. I'm sure you can get lucky though and the virtual person in your head matches the real person. Otherwise online dating wouldn't be that successful, would it?
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