Computer suitors bare feelings and `don't have to worry about safe sex'

If Jeanne Brink had met husband Conan in a bar, chances are they wouldn't be married today. For one thing, three of her five children are older than he is.

"I would not have sat down with somebody 22 years old and gotten to know him, particularly if he looked like Charles Manson, because Conan does resemble him a little," says Jeanne, who is 25 years older.

But none of that mattered two years ago when Jeanne, in Orange, Calif., and Conan, 400 miles upstate in Menlo Park, began playing card games via computer over The ImagiNation Network. They became online friends. Jeanne, a free-lance medical transcriber whose online nickname was GrammaJ, playfully "adopted" Conan, a computer programmer, as her sixth child.

Eventually she admitted, first to a friend, then to Conan, "I don't really think of him as a mom." The feeling was mutual. A weekend get-to-know-you meeting in Orange turned into a nine-day stay. They married six months later.

Stories like this - of long-distance love forged facelessly on computer networks - abound on commercial online services, bulletin boards, the Internet and other electronic gathering spots. While sweet talk in cyberspace can lead to broken hearts, even broken marriages, it also has resulted in more than a few lasting loves.

How can you fall in love with someone you've never met? It happens all the time. As sales of computers and modems - devices that allow computers to connect via phone lines - explode, online hangouts are the singles bars and health clubs of the '90s.

"The whole phenomenon of love and people meeting online has really gone mainstream," says Deborah Baumrucker, who met husband Steve on America Online. Both have written books about the love-online phenomenon.

"My first thought was, `Oh, those poor, desperate people who had to go to a computer to find somebody," says Sissy Kinnaird, 31, a former secretary from Stillwater, Okla., who has since changed her opinion. On Feb. 19, she'll marry a man she met while playing a trivia game on the ImagiNation Network.

But rather than a refuge for lonely hearts, cyberspace more closely resembles a crowded ballroom or shopping mall, where it's easy to meet a lot of people in a short period of time. "You have the opportunity to sift through people online," says Steve Baumrucker. "You can meet 200 people in one night."

For homebodies, it may be the only way to make social connections. "With me having three kids, I don't go out," says Tammy Baxley, 33, divorced and an America Online regular from Winston-Salem, N.C. "This is my only adult-chat nightlife kind of thing."

Many of the barriers to communication that are common in a face-to-face setting simply aren't there online. "You're not as self-conscious. It's just a computer screen in front of you, so it's easy to say what you're feeling, what you're thinking," says Lisa Bishop, 38, a biochemistry graduate student in Augusta, Ga., who "met" Steve Casey, 41, of Indianapolis, in a single parents forum on Prodigy last spring. Now they co-host a similar forum on Delphi, and will marry in July.

And, since you haven't met yet, "you don't have to worry about safe sex on a computer," says Jerrold Lee Shapiro, associate professor of counseling psychology at Santa Clara University in California. "It's not going to be sexual for some time, and that really helps people relax and not worry about that stuff."

While every online service and many bulletin boards have singles chat areas or classified ads, two people can connect almost anywhere. Steve Schonberger, 31, a Redmond, Wash., computer programmer, met wife Kari Haug, 28, in an Internet discussion group for fans of singer Kate Bush. Kari lived in Oslo, Norway, at the time.

Computer-generated relationships may seem impersonal to the uninitiated. But those who have been through them say it can be intense and deeply personal.

"You're separated by distance and you have a craving to meet each other. So you try to have some sort of closeness, and the only thing you can do is write," says Casey. "You have to talk about something, so you talk about your history, your goals, your accomplishments. You tend to know more about each other in a much shorter period of time than you would if you went to the movies and talked on the phone once in a while."

That's why these relationships often progress from chat, to frequent phone calls, to face-to-face meetings, to marriage proposals in less than a year. By e-mailing love missives, "you can do a year's worth of typical pen-pal correspondence in a day," says Steve Baumrucker.

Celia Martin met her future husband, Robert, in a role-playing game on ImagiNation Network last May, just before embarking on a Bahamas cruise. "Every evening we played together and we really hit it off well," she says.

"I thought of him frequently when I was gone," she says. "When I came back, we were playing again, and a few days later I said, `I don't know why I'm telling you this, but I'm very interested in you.' "

With that, Celia, a college administrator in Cincinnati, and Robert, a toy store manager in Peoria, Ill., both divorced and in their 40s, began their courtship in earnest. Upon getting home, they would log on to their computers and chat or play until after midnight. On the weekends they spent 10 to 12 hours a day online.

They exchanged photos (first impression: neither was the other's ideal), and finally met in July. "He was everything I wanted. I was just madly in love with him," says Celia. They were married Sept. 2, and now live in Peoria.

Not all online relationships are successful. For every happy ending there are countless false starts, broken hearts and infatuations that couldn't make the transition from the computer screen to the real thing.

Before meeting Kari, Schonberger had other online relationships that "ranged from a neutral, didn't-work-out sort of thing to disaster." Casey had two prior online romances - one in which a woman "lied about a number of things" and another in which they met and realized "there was no attraction."

For obvious reasons, online relationships are vulnerable to liars and con artists. Members of almost every online community can tell stories about people who lied about their age, gender or marital status.

A month after opening her America Online account in 1992, Baxley left her husband of 13 years for a man she met online. The day before she was to fly to Boston to meet him for the first time, he confessed he was married. She divorced anyway. Baxley's advice: "Meet the person first before you really go head over heels."

Steve Baumrucker has more advice. Be stingy with details about yourself, particularly your phone number and last name, until some level of trust has developed. How do you know when that is? "How do you know in real life?" he asks. "You have to take a chance, and you're going to get burned every once in a while, too."