In fact I 'met' my current boyfriend in EQ. It was the silliest thing really. Boy this was when EQ was first started and the Bertox server was still young before our first server split. I was playing my first character the famous Bard of Freeport, Markie. I had gotten lost and wandered into the Oasis of Marr barely alive. There this handsome wood elf druid comes along to 'save' me. Being an outgoing bard character I thanked him and we chatted a few moments while we rested. I made it out of the Oasis and back to my group to hunt bandits again in North Ro. Over time we chatted it up as players since we seem to be playing at the same times. I am such the role-player I am always playing Markie so it never hard to find me when I am online. He, however, has quite a few characters since he finds he can’t make up his mind which suits him. But he starts to play one of Markie's weaknesses. Paladins!! Well Markie is being courted by several paladins in-game. None of which I find that worthy since I don't 'know' them. I start hearing 'grumbles' from my real life boyfriend at the time about all of this 'interest' in me. Bah! I tell him they are only interested in Markie and I prove it! I ask my new friend what he thinks and he agrees he would be honored to 'court' Markie. So we exchange emails and become friends. My boyfriend insists he 'likes' me. I even ask him straight out and he tells me no problem, in game only. I think that it was the first time in my life I ever got the chance to really become good friends with some one without all the sexual tension and oh what do I wear and how do I look getting in the way? I think meeting on line was both easier and harder. We never planned this whole thing at all. I found that more and more my friend on line was the person who understood and was the person who talked to me. My role-playing being in love with his character and playing and chatting with him most every night kinda set us up to 'find each other'. We found we had much in common and we even lived in the same friggin' STATE. It was friggin weird. And we both found that our real life relationships were in the toilet because they were not what we wanted. And one day I just confessed I needed to break up with my boyfriend and he was in shock when I told him he was the reason why. After that things were kinda weird we kept playing but we didn’t get round to meeting in person for about 4 months. Yeah we were both shy. But since then we have been together and happy ever since. That was almost 4 years ago. Who ever knew I owe my happiness in love to in part to a game? [F, 32]

When I first started playing EQ, it was to have some fun once a week with some coworkers. When they quit playing, I'd already made some 'friends' that I enjoyed grouping with, so I kept playing. At the time, I was single and had no intention of ever changing that. One of the people I met in game was going through a divorce. I've been moral support for guys going through their divorces before, and wound up doing it again (I seem to be a sympathetic person and easy to talk to). Through our many conversations (online, through IM, email, and phone), I reconsidered my hardline stance against remarriage. In the meantime, I had gotten married online to someone (see question below for the explanation) that I never considered a potential RL love interest. He was much younger than I was, and lived on the other side of the country. However, he had asked me out to visit, and as he was acting jealous of my friendship with the person getting the divorce, I decided to go ahead and meet him, so that he would understand how silly it was for him to care about who I might get involved with IRL. Well, it didn't turn out that way. He moved here about 2 months after we met, proposed a few months later, we found out shortly thereafter that I had gotten pregnant (around the time he proposed!), and now we're married with an 11-month-old baby, and so far, still very happy. [EQ, F, 39]