On their first date, set up through a mutual friend, Jackie Curtiss and Rob Matz met at a cowboy bar in Vancouver. Matz dyed his hair silver and Curtiss put on a pair of tight jeans to impress. They downed some drinks, hugged and fell for each other instantly. For their next date, Matz wanted to really stun her, so instead of going to a movie, they climbed to the top of a building and went roof jumping.
That is, virtual roof jumping, as well as virtual hugging in virtual Vancouver, because Matz and Curtiss met in Utherverse, a popular online 3-D universe where players interact in virtual cities, bars and, well, do pretty much anything else you can do in the real world, including have virtual sex.
For months, they continued their online courtship by spending romantic virtual nights together.
"We lived together pretty much since the moment we met in a virtual sense," says Matz, 28. Meanwhile, Curtiss, 33, calls Matz her "knight in shining pixels."
This digital romance may seem like a harmless fantasy, but falling for an online persona whom you've never met has real consequences. First of all, your new true love might not even exist.
Just look at Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o, who became smitten in 2009 when a woman "pursued him" on Facebook and then suddenly "died" in September 2012. It turned out the woman was invented by a friend of his — and Te'o fell for an avatar, leading to nationwide scorn and ridicule.
People wondered out loud: How could someone like Te'o — a good-looking star athlete at a top-tier school — fall in love with a picture?
Experts say it can happen to anyone, and it's happening more often these days — especially to dreamer types who make easy targets.
"It's the same population that likes to go see romantic comedies," says Max Joseph, co-host of MTV's "Catfish," which investigates Web romances to find out whether the people involved are legit. (They're often not.) "Anyone who believes in love and wants it to happen to them is susceptible."
Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, understands the feeling firsthand. Even though Epstein is a computer-intelligence expert, he found himself chatting online seven years ago with a woman who, after three months, he realized was not a sexy Russian love interest, but a chatbot programmed to auto-reply.
"It's crazy because I'm supposedly an expert in this area," he says. "It is really, really easy to be fooled."
Online relationships have been around as long as the first AOL chat room, but technological advances in recent years have changed their status to "it's complicated." Epstein estimates hundreds of thousands of people online are chatting with someone who is not whom they appear to be. The phenomenon is "out of control," adds Nev Schulman, the host and executive producer of MTV's "Catfish" and the star of the 2010 "Catfish" film that inspired the series.
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