Several months ago, we issued a call to readers for cyber-dating stories. We wanted to know, can true love be found on the Internet? Your answers -- yay, nay and undecided -- flooded our in boxes, and since then we've been publishing your best and worst tales of love won and lost in our popular series, Match Made in Heaven, Match Made in Hell.
Your tales of frenzied instant-messenger sex were a continual source of joy and inspiration. We wept with the man whose reward for being honest about his weight condition was getting stood up on a Brooklyn street corner. We cried tears of joy for the loving couple who found each other on a bondage site. We, too, shuddered with the narrator as a potential tryst was destroyed by the sound of her romantic hopeful's overlong toenails clicking in time to his footsteps on her hardwood floors.
Readers, we hope you did too.
However, we also received letters demanding to know why we were limiting our call to stories of love found and lost on the Internet. Have we as a culture gone so virtual, so technological, that we've lost touch with the beating of the pre-Internet heart? Lovelorn Saloners wanted to share their stories with us, but they didn't have DSL, or even a land line, to anchor their stories to the Web.
In answer to their pleas, we now concede that true love is a brick-and-mortar quest. Yes, we still want you to share your romantic victories and defeats with us, but no, they need not have begun with an e-mail, or even a mouse click. If your match made in heaven or match made in hell took place in what some of us nostalgically refer to as the "real" world, then by all means, send us those stories too.
After all, True Love knows no boundaries.
-- The editors
(Please remember: All writing submitted becomes the property of Salon. We reserve the right to edit submissions, and cannot reply to every writer. Interested contributors should send their stories either to heaven@salon.com or hell@salon.com)
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