Well, my mum and dad struggled for years, made some money, settled down nicely - free from the kids - finally only needing to work part-time.
My dad apparently then took up cybersex with PC camera he got one birthday, made some contacts, cheated a bit, then went off to Manchester to settle with someone he had only ever met a couple of times in real life.
I only ever saw everything from my mum's end - how it took her husband from her, and with that broke her family - it took her house from her, her physical security, sent her into 2 hellish years that she literally still bears physically in the form of a stress condition that affected her entire skin.
It has, of course, also affected us kids - I'm the eldest, and if I'm honest the possibility of my parents splitting up never seemed to be a suprise when I was growing up.
However, they really had reached a stage of accomplishment in their lives as a couple - or so it had seemed. My mum had actually turned around at one point and said that it was too perfect - that something could only go wrong. This was before Dad got his PC camera.
Of my two brothers, the youngest seems to have taken it hardest - he was 21, I think when it happened. I'm not sure whether he is on speaking terms with my dad any more.
Everything was turned upside down - truly. Dad lives across England now. I've offered to visit but he decline the last occasion. He forgets birthdays now as well.
At the end of the day, flirting and sexual associations through the internet only are all based on fantasy and illusion, in my opinion. Although I can get a sense of some people's character and being sometimes, it remains an important point that these are simply projections - not real selves - everything filtered and carefully considered away from the real
spontaneity of physical contact.
I never flirt online, never chat people up, never cybersex, never fill dating forms, form dreams of online people and chase them or otherwise fantasise about those I meet on the internet. To me it;s all flagrant illusion, and I'm not falling for it.
Would I love to meet lots of the people I befriend on the internet? Absolutely. But entirely because I have seen them as friends over the long-term. I never never fantasised about any women I met on the net in a sexual manner.
(I am, however, a sexually-repressed Brit, which maybe forms part of my perception.
)
I won't forget seeing how cybersex affected my family, even though my mum and dad appear to be with people they truly love. That is for their judgement.
I was always one of those kids at school whose parents were not divorced, though plenty others went through it. Even though my own did not until I was in my late twenties, I can only truly feel for the sense of loss and abondonment that any child in such a situation must feel. In some ways, my mother and father together were my family - with them separated, I have neither one family nor two - that concept no longer exists. Their lives are no longer mine.
