When I saw this thread, I prtty much decided this was the best place to share my story. I'll try to keep it short though.
A little more than a year ago, I was just discovering this new side of myself that was interested in BDSM. So, rather than go to my long term girlfriend at the time, I did what any other normal person would do...turn to the internet. One of the submissives that I talked to online, the first one I'd ever talked to that was near my age, and near my area, was jules. As luck would have it, she was in a relationship at the time too. We both thought that the relationships we were in at the time wouldn't end. But, also, as that same luck would have it, I was about to be going off to the same school that she had just graduated from about a month earlier. Since we were both in relationships at the time, we probably wouldn't have talked after that, until she realized we were going to the same school. We started talk about that, and as time progressed, we started to talk about life, about our 'others'. Eventually, we began to realize that we had a LOT in common, all those little coincedences from growing up, right jules? Well, anyways, we talked online for nearly a year, and I saw two pictures of her, and she saw a couple of me. We finally met after 11 months of talking online, and at about that time, we both became single.
So basically the moral of my story is....online relationships can work, even if you don't plan on taking them further than friendship, although I think ours worked so well because we were completely honest with eachother. We started out that way, and now that we're going further than friends, we're staying that way.