Is a virtual affair real-world infidelity?

“She no longer became the funny, excited and refreshing girl I had fallen for,” he says.

There was a breakup, a half-hearted reconciliation and a final breakup. What Sam didn’t expect, he says, is how much the virtual breakup would affect him.

“My feelings for Kat were no different in many ways than what happens in a real-life relationship,” he says. “All the way down to a breakup.”  

“It’s not the sex, it’s the emotional intimacy,” says Au. “You’re online at 2 a.m. getting very personal and talking about stuff that you should only be talking about with your boyfriend, girlfriend or whatever.

Some folks use virtual relationships as a way to experiment. The excitement is what initially drew Sam to hook up with Kat. And plenty of people are interested in the sex aspect of the hookups. “It’s a more interactive form of masturbation,” says Au. “And everyone’s going to do that on occasion.”

Plenty of people, though, initiate in-game romances because they’re seeking something that’s lacking in their real-life relationship.

Amanda, 20, started up a friendship with someone she met in “World of Warcraft.” Her real-life relationship was one that she terms as “moderately abusive,” and her real-life boyfriend as “very controlling.” Her in-game guy, Joel, was much nicer. He spent hours teaching her how to play the game. They went on raids together. In-game chat graduated to AIM chat. Then long telephone conversations.

“You talk about your day, your dreams, that kind of thing.” she says. “I couldn’t get that from my real-life boyfriend.”

Max, 39, isn’t sure what drove his soon-to-be-ex-wife to have a relationship in Second Life. He says she refused to talk about it, and if he asked questions, she’d just hop online and freeze him out.

“I thought she was going through a depression and she’d get bored and move on with life,” he says. “But she kept getting deeper and deeper.”

Within six months of signing up for Second Life, Max’s wife was spending up to eight hours a day online — and even more on the weekends. She and her in-world boyfriend were in constant contact — even when they weren’t in-world. Max says he found out later that his wife and her avatar boyfriend were having drinks together — in his house — via Web cam.

Max went on Google and started doing some detective work. To his amazement, he learned that his wife had married her in-world boyfriend in Second Life.

“I had my dad looking over my shoulder at the stuff I was finding,” he says. “Just so I could ask him ‘Am I crazy? Am I really seeing this?’”

Max ended up pulling the Internet connection out of the wall, and he says his wife started trashing the house. The end came, says Max, when she threw a punch.

“I’m 6 foot, 200 pounds,” he says. “When she took a swing, I said, ‘no, we’re not going past this point.’” The two are currently finalizing divorce proceedings.

Although Max’s wife did end up meeting her virtual boyfriend in the real world, that often isn’t the case with virtual relationships. Sarah had a plane ticket bought and plans to meet her virtual partner, Martin — but she canceled her trip.

“One day I had the realization that I didn’t really want that guy,” she says. “What I wanted was for my husband to treat me like that guy.”

Sarah and her husband split up, and have since divorced. But Sarah credits Second Life with showing her what she wanted from a partner — attention, affection and romance. She gets all that from her current real-life boyfriend — a guy Sarah says she’ll probably marry.

And even though Sarah’s boyfriend didn’t ask her to, she ended her Second Life relationship last year. As a result, she doesn’t go in-world that much anymore.

“I decided that I didn’t want to partition my love,” she says. “I just wanted to have one person to call ‘sweetheart.’”

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