Do *you* think it's real?

I've had some people ask me recently if I think that sex in Second Life (or anywhere else that's considered an 'online' environment - chatrooms, etc) is "real". My emphatic answer was immediately 'yes', but now I'm wondering how other people feel.

My 'online' days started years and years and years ago on IRC (DALnet, woo!) in one little chatroom and let me assure you, there was a lot of sex going on there as well. Second Life is not the first time people have had sex online, despite what some articles may have you think (oooo, people are being unfaithful online! It's the devil himself at work!). Second Life brings a 'visual' to it, that's for sure, but the underlying effect is still the same.

I am personally not the kind of person that can separate their online and offline lives. One is part of the other for me, and I also truly believe that my online identity helped shape the person I've become and also gave me the strength to make some amazingly powerful changes in my life. I've met dozens and dozes of 'online' friends in offline meetings, parties, and get-togethers and every single time I've been amazed at how perfectly at ease I've felt with the person when meeting them for the first time in the 'physical' world. You get to know someone online in very different ways than if you met that person offline. It's as though online environments are some sort of microscope into a person's psyche and it's truly amazing (and in my mind, incredibly fantastic) that you can know so much about a person just from watching the mannerisms of their avatar, their punctuation, or their grammar.

I've met people recently that think it's just 'incredibly interesting' that I meet people offline that I met initially online when to me.. this is just part of who I am and what I've done for years. For the life of me I can't grasp why it's so fascinating or 'weird' to people. With all the ways to meet people online these days- IRC, Second Life, message boards, forums, chatrooms, and God knows how many websites are now dedicated to hooking people up - why is it still so 'weird' to some people?

What about you? Are you the kind of person that can separate your online and offline lives? Have you met people in person that you met online first? Have you felt that incredibly strong connection with someone you've just recently met online? Have you taken online sex into the 'real world'? Or are you one of those people that just think it's 'weird'?

-xopixox