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| The Mysterious Sweetie. That's Me in the Background |
1. Do you date in Second Life?
I have not dated in Second Life, and dated only a couple of times in real life, I
take romance and love when it comes my way, and that never happens when I'm
looking for it. I learned that quickly after a couple of dates as a teenager. It put me off. The girl was expected to defend her virtue, and the boy was expected to do whatever he could to violate it. It was sickening.
I did not come into Second Life for romance. It wasn't on my mind, but I
immediately found it. I was in world less than a month when I chanced across an
avatar with whom I quickly and deeply fell in love. Today, ten years later, I am just as deeply in love. Happily, she is as much in love with me.
2. Share some locations in Second Life that you think are
ideal to go to on a date.
Second Life is full of romantic spots. My love and I never
went to them; instead we went exploring for the ridiculous and the sublime in
Second Life. Nowadays we hang out at our regions Whimsy and Whimsy Kaboom,
which were influenced in many ways by the no longer extant region Privateer
Space.
3. Share a story of one of your favorite dates/proposals
you’ve experienced in Second Life, or something someone has done for you that
meant a lot.
I wouldn't call it a date, as we were just hanging out, but one of my best times in Second Life was an evening with Jesse Prior, who had a habit of suddenly and instantaneously turning into an accordian-playing robot gorilla. Our time together began with me showing him a garden, progressed to Jesse pulling out an assortment of free vehicles, all of which crashed and left me stranded, and ended with me falling out of the sky onto the doomed ocean liner Titanic. You can read about that night right here.
4. Have you ever fallen in love in Second Life?
Oh, yes, quickly and deeply. I was in world less than a
month. I saw her building a fountain on a hill in Dreamland Asia and said
hello. She wound up building a custom house for me for the absurdly low price
of five hundred lindens. When her property disappeared because her no-account boyfriend
didn't pay the tier, she came to my property to finish the house. By the time
it was completed, boyfriend had vanished and I was head over heels. I think the
moment I flipped was when I learned how badly her aged Mac laptop was rendering
the world and how she had built a beautiful house she could barely see.
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| This is How Sweetie Saw Second Life |
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| Here's My View of the Same Area |
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| Here's the House She Somehow Managed to Build |
5. Have you ever gotten partnered or married in Second Life?
Said avatar and I have been inseparable since November 2006.
It was awkward at first when we began to use voice. She was recovering from an
abusive marriage and reluctant to become attached, and I had been divorced for several decades and wasn't looking to get hitched, so our romance progressed
slowly. It was several years before we were partnered in Second Life.
We were 850 miles apart in the real world (fortunately, we
were in the same time zone), and there was an age difference, but we clicked
together on many levels. We met in real life in March or April of 2007 and I
was soon traveling to New York from my home in Georgia for long visits.
Fortunately, I had lots of vacation time.
Meanwhile, back in Second Life, we bought a region and named
it Whimsy. We worked on all sorts of projects. We learned much about one
another in Second Life, and when we were apart SL gave us a way to be together.
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| Whimsy. You Should Visit! |
I retired in 2009 and our visits in real life became more
frequent. We looked in vain for a house we could afford. Eventually we found
one that met our requirements and we bought it in the fall of 2014. I sold my
house in Georgia in January of the next year and moved lock stock and barrel to
the frozen Northeast. We were married in April.
Over the years I have blogged in deliberately exaggerated ways about the mysterious Sweetie, who is of course, now my real life spouse.
This began because she was protective not only of her real identify, but of her
virtual one, and continued because it was so much more fun to have a Second
Life mate who never shows her face for photographs.
We have been happily married in real life for three years. We have been out
of Second Life for those three years because we were busy with other things and
because our laptops were aging and didn't do well in world and because, well, we were together. I'm in Second Life regularly now, creating more absurd builds on Whimsy, and Sweetie, who now has
an Alienware laptop, joins me on occasion. I will always be grateful to Phil
Linden for leading me to her.
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| Lava Girls. Photo by Greg Paslong |
