Good evening, thir. It's good to make your acquaintance and I'm honored by the close attention you gave to, and the thoughtful response you crafted to, my note. Three quick thoughts, two somewhat nerdish.

1. The 90% study you allude to was really poorly done. It's usually cited as 93% and derives from a series of little studies done by Albert Mehrabian in 1972. He had, among other things, subjects look at a series of photographs of faces and then just whether the word "maybe" was meant positively, negatively or neutrally. (Why yes, that is a bit loony.) In another, he tested reactions to an unhappy-looking person saying "you did a good job" and a happy-looking one say "you did a bad job." But it's such a fun fact to toss about that it's pretty much unstoppable.

2. Falling in love over the net is nothing new. Tom Standage's book, The Victorian Internet, tells the story of the transformative powers of the electric telegraph in the late 19th century. And yes, people fell in love over the telegraph (operators listened for the special rhythm of their beloved's dots and dashes) and, in at least one case, got married by telegraph -- without ever having met in person.

3. There's a pretty consistent body of research that says folks do act differently OL than IRL. Not that they're schizophrenic and have completely different personalities OL, but that we're - on whole - more "out there" OL than IRL. Some folks negotiate that new environment beautifully: they grasp the implied rules quickly and adjust well to the lack of normal cues. Many struggle a bit more here than there. I was mostly trying to offer some reasons for how we might understand those differences.

As ever,

S.