Again, geography seems likely to be an insurmountable barrier in these cases, and more so than with Facebook. If your FB friends are mostly local to your area, and so are theirs, then a fair fraction of your more indirect FB contacts (friends of friends, etc.) are likely to be local. On the other hand with an internet forum there’s no geographic bias beyond the one induced by the forum’s language bias. With an English-language forum, for example, you’ll get a huge number of people from across North America, a fair number from the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, and a smattering from everywhere else with net access. Even supposing nearly everyone is in NA in practice the mean distance to a contact will be measured in the thousands of km (if you’re in NA; if not, make it tens of thousands). And that creates nearly insurmountable barriers to having a relationship with nearly everyone else there.

First, dating will be very expensive. Plane tickets cost hundreds of dollars. Driving seems cheaper at first, but the gas cost these days is still likely to come to over one hundred, plus it becomes a week-long trip. How much money do you lose if you miss a week of work off without pay? If you’re unemployed the missed work disappears as a problem, but you’re also unlikely to be able to afford the gas (or even have a car at all, and bussing will cost nearly as much as a plane, and be slower and more inconvenient, though the TSA is working hard to make air travel just as bad). And if they are intercontinental unless you’re rich you’re SOL. Plane tickets across oceans cost a fortune, you’ll have to miss days of work anyway at those distances, and going by ship would mean missing weeks of work.

OK, suppose you’re rich then, or at least wealthy enough to be able to afford weekly two-way plane tickets to Metroville, The Other Coast or car/bus trips to Small City, The Other End Of Your Own Coast. The relationship gets serious; you’ve really hit it off. Now what?

Now, one of you has to quit his or her current job and go through the ardurous, slow, and expensive process of moving to a new city. Whoever it is will lose their current local social support network. In this economy there is likely to be a long time before he or she manages to get a new job. For a long time, whoever moves will be at the mercy of their new romantic partner, utterly dependent on them for financial and social support, having been uprooted and transplanted away from all previous cheap-to-access support and sources of income. It’s going to be painful no matter what, ending long friendships and workplace relationships, and it’s a significant gamble. It’s very likely neither person will be willing to go through that, and that makes the relationship DOA.

And now, what if one of you did move? Then what? Already, a commitment bigger than most marriages has been made, but in a one-sided manner with one partner taking on all of the downside and risk — jumping there straight from “seeing each other maybe once a week”! If there are ANY problems at all this asymmetry is going to create serious psychological/relationship issues. And Murphy’s Law says there will inevitably be problems. Likely, the problems, combined with the asymmetric commitment, will drive a wedge straight through the relationship, and it will implode messily.

Failing that, it becoming an unhealthy codependent relationship seems likely to be an-ever present risk, unless the transplanted partner quickly finds a job and develops local friendships and contacts in the new city that are independent of his or her partner.

Of course, the above issues are generic to long-distance relationships. The point is that they are very severe obstacles, combined with the fact that pretty much [i]all[/i] web-forum-originating relationships are bound to be long-distance unless the forum is on a local-interest topic or in a language spoken in only a tiny geographic area.

So, if you’re going to go the forum route, all I can recommend is that you don’t.

Failing that, your best bet would be to move to northern France and learn Basque.