Sue especially relished his sense of humor. “I could log in after a totally crappy day in classes and I’d have some corny e-mail from Greg that would send a smile to my face no matter what I felt like. He was, still is, and probably will be, the only person who can really cheer me up no matter what the circumstances are.” Love, however, just wasn’t on the minds of Greg and Sue in those early days. She had family and friends in Kansas City and counted on braving the frigid Missouri winters while she went to college. Meanwhile she had experienced her share of romances off the Net, including one with a shy friend who helped introduce her to the online world by suggesting that they _type_ to each other. Sue may or may not have been ready for yet another relationship. Even if she and Greg were just friends, they were paving the way for something more by slowly trading secrets about themselves. Lois Shawver, a California psychologist often online, warned me of the lack of trust that can afflict many long-distance relationships via computer. And yet paradoxically, the Net could bring people closer to each other. “It’s so easy to end a relationship,” Shawver told me, “you simply stop corresponding.” So “people seem to be more willing to take a chance and disclose intimately. That helps to create trust. I do think that also explains the medium’s ability to help people bridge cultural gaps.” It was all certainly true in the case of Sue and Greg. Helpful, too, was the emphasis that they placed on the platonic at the start, without even meaning to do so. Is it just possible that horny young men and women on the Internet and elsewhere could declare a one-year moratorium on the raunchier forms of “cybersex” where men and women exchanged lewd remarks with each other, Teletype fashion, in group settings? Ditto for the online world’s many homosexuals and bisexuals. Ironically the aftermath might be _more_ sex and better sex after some true friendships developed by way of electronic mail and one-to-one chats. One test of friendship, of course, might be this: Would a couple still write to each other if their Net connection ended? And Sue and Greg had passed so far: Her Internet account had vanished after she left Northwestern Missouri State University to work and go to school part-time. She ended up at an insurance company. Letters written on pulped trees, comic strips, editorial cartoons, music cassettes, material of all kinds, had traveled between Australia and Missouri. “We got closer and closer with each postage stamp,” Sue told me, “and believe me, there were a bunch. The post office likes me a _lot_.” Finally, however, Sue had returned to the Net, this time with a private account