The support people muster on these boards is really moving. It's wonderful to be part of a community.
Well, would just like to interject something here, simply a note of caution (from a lot of experience in this respect). Online communities, or online interactions in general, can be very deceptive - it's
far too easy to feel superficially close to people you don't really know, or at least would know very differently if you saw them regularly in real-life. The distance that is provided by the fact that people are speaking from behind computer screens makes it easy to write/say things that you wouldn't do, or at least not so readily, otherwise. And one builds up mental pictures of people (not just in terms of what they look like, but more widely in terms of personality) that again are often far off the mark, and can start spending more 'time' with online friends than real ones. Remember that, for every single person you know online, chances are you are only seeing of them what they want you to see. The medium (in whichever format) is attractive to those who want an easy feeling of community that can be accessed whenever they want; this is an un-maintainable ideal, and as such, when things turn a bit sour between people in that community, it can seem more upsetting than it would in other circumstances. Obviously things are a little different her to some other places, as quite a few of us either knew each other previously, meet, or have met. But bear in mind - in the case of the latter options, even though we might meet from time to time, does that necessarily mean, in the case of any pair or group of people here, that we would otherwise meet regularly (if that were practical) if we only knew each other from a real-life encounter? If not, then one should be sceptical about whether the people can be called genuine friends or not.
I'm sorry, people might dislike what I'm going to say here, but I have found the events of the last few days here a little worrying. I wouldn't dream of advising anyone on what to do when a relationship has gone sour unless I knew both people very well indeed. There's always another side, and sometimes neither party really has an idea of what the other feels about things, what their problems are, etc. But the idea of making a decision about whether to stay with someone, or urging one, amongst people who in some cases are strangers one only knows from posts on here - well, what is the word coming to? One's personal future swayed by an online forum?? And Mort, how would you feel if some future partner of yours did the same? Do you think the other people on whatever forum they went to would have a rounded, balanced view of what you, or your relationship, are like, just on the basis of what he had told them? I'm not remotely going to say anything about whether this was the right thing to do or not - I have no way of knowing, nor do most people here. Here people will often tell you what you want to hear - those aren't your real friends. Don't make this 'community' into a substitute for real friends. Like everyone else, I really hope you'll be happy one way or another, but that is a general feeling of goodwill, not a comment on particular circumstances.
And I'm saying this as someone who's been heavily involved in musical and political forums for some time, as well as having met many people for romantic or casual encounters from online. The one thing I know above all from that is that wherever possible, one should try and shift one's interactions from online to real-life as soon as is possible (I usually cut people dead if I've been speaking to them for more than two weeks and they won't speak on the phone or something) - it's always very different. Would many people deny that when they first met people from here in the flesh, quite a few of them were very different from how they had imagined them to be?
