Given the obstacles that women often face on the Internet, then, it is amazing at times that _any_ romances happen there. When they do, yet another danger arises—the risk of missed cues. A friendship online may cause either sex to ignore mismatched words and gestures that might put them on guard. One Los Angeles women met her boyfriend on a BBS and suffered a disaster that could just as well have happened by way of the Net. He got her pregnant, begged her not to abort, married her, and made life a real hell, not just a virtual one, until they divorced. Worrisome, too, are the eternal tensions that go on in cyberspace between sincere Befrienders and not-so-sincere Gamesplayers, who the former have trouble detecting. The Befrienders seek friends and lovers; the Gamesplayers would just as soon toy with a human as hack a program. An argument might even be made that high tech attracts more than its share of people who thrive on impermanence. You do not last long in computers if you believe that Pentium-level chips are forever, or that 28.8K-bps modems are more than throwaway technology in the general scheme of things. Faster chips, higher speed modems, and new girlfriends or boyfriends are sure to come along. That’s the mind-set. Let’s just hope that the girlfriends and boyfriends will last. “I am burning with a need to talk with you, to share with you my fears, my joys,” one Australian women cooed via modem to a man in the Canadian province of Alberta. Within two weeks her ardor did not just cool, it inexplicably froze. “This is the very last time I will write to you,” she said. Very possibly—we can’t say for sure without ESP—the Australian woman was a Gamesplayer. Gamesplayers enjoy at least one big advantage on the Internet. They can post their electronic want ads through computers, known as anonymous servers, that strip their names and other compromising identifiers.[7.3] And replies can come through anonymous servers. The same technology used to protect privacy can let Gamesplayers fool victim after victim, and even mask genders. Particularly in fantasy games on the Net you can never be sure if you’re typing to a woman or a man who just wants more attention—abusive or not. What’s more, for the skillful there are ways to forge messages to unsuspecting neophytes. Another negative is that the Net can be as helpful to adulterers as to the moral and sincere. A techie has just poured out to me a story of the kind that Carson McCullers would have written if she had fixated on the Internet rather than on the American South. His wife, the mother of two children, has been using the Net to cheat on him in a massive way. She befriended two alcoholics by way of her modem, the marriage counselor says he has done all he could, and now comes word that she just might have the AIDS virus; I hear it’s too early for a conclusive HIV test.