I craved overt affection…

The wounds of the intense emotional abuse in my marriage made it difficult for me to identify yet another narcissist: Andrew.

The emotional pull was so incredibly strong, that concrete fact faded into the distance of my mind each time Andrew and I exchanged heated email messages in rapid fire succession, sometimes for up to six hours in a single evening.

I rationalized the inexplicable and compromised my values. Whenever my mind would scream “This isn’t right!,” Andrew would end up sending a captivating message that kept my skeptical heart paralyzed, binding it in hope and desire.

Andrew would initiate an email anywhere from 10:30 pm to 12:30 am almost every night (red flag). He would type a phrase, sentence or paragraph that would describe exactly what he envisioned we were doing. I would almost immediately respond within seconds and the evening would begin. The heat was palpable; the raw vulnerability was so intense I would shake.

The mind can stir anything.  It collects images, emotions, memories and desires, and shapes them into something as concrete as the furniture in one’s living room.

Am I the only one to fall in love online?

It pummeled my heart like an intense flash of light punishes the eye. An unexpected and unwelcome epiphany. Standing in Chicago’s Midway airport, returning from a solo trip to Denver, I understood that my deeply intimate, all-consuming relationship must end. It should not have been a difficult decision.

My love – the man who made me breathless just at the thought of his touch — never actually touched me at all. He also never called me on the phone or took me to dinner. In fact, I never once spent time with him in the flesh.

My boyfriend lived in my computer, so to speak. Ours was an electronically-mediated relationship, lasting one year, one month and 20 days. One would think that a professional, suburban mom in her mid-forties would be immune from the lure of love and sex on the Internet.  I was not.

It started on Facebook.

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