Confessions of a Chat Room Addict

There are so many places on the Web today where one can go and meet people. It can usually be based upon interest, where they are geographically, and so on, and we all tend to keep to our own sub-circle depending on what it is that someone is loking for.

Since my advent upon the scene some ten or fifteen years ago, my first experiences were in my early twenties, when a family member and I had our first computer (* a 466 DX), and it was not until after a great amount of experimentation that I was finding how vast and expansive this subculture really was. There so many people from so many places, from within my own country and as well as the rest of the world. I had met people from as far away as Australia to as close as just a few towns away in my own home state. As the days passed, I was finding myself more and more engrossed with the people that I met and what was going on in their lives as opposed to what I was experiencing in my own life, and I was finding that my own life was beginning to slip away from me as I had stayed up long nights just to talk with people that I didn't even know.

But, while all of this may have been true, if I had not been an addict of chat rooms, I would never have met my current wife now of five years. For us, the chat arena was not just a place where we met. It was our own world where we could leave life behind for a while and just concentrate on the simpler forms of life.We would talk about everything from movies to our favorite sports teams all the way down to family lineage, and there wasn't anyone else that had anything to say about it simply because they didn't know me personally and they knew me only by the handle that I chose to use. Now, after nearly five years later, I still was curious as to why chat areas had such an impact on me and why my life had suddenly changed so drastically due to simply typing our messages across the screen to people that we could not see let alone hear, but rather knew them by whatever nickname they chose as well.