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When you fall in love for the first time it can be the most special kind of love there is. One you will remember for the rest of your life and one you may base your future relationships on. I can remember my very first love and the strong emotions that went with it, at a time when my emotions were running strong anyway. I can remember my Mother shaking her head in wonderment at the choices I was making at the time, but never was she judgmental, only loving and understanding at what she had gone through herself and the importance of letting me know what I was feeling was different yet the same as everyone goes through at one point in their lives.

Teenage love is in my opinion is the first experience in the what we as adults know one of the many kinds of love you will and can feel in the normal course of life, its importance being what we will take and learn from the love we feel because more times then not it will end and then comes our first broken heart. What I think we some times forget to tell our teenagers is we have been there and we understand, but as adults, just as our parents did, we need to let them know there are limits to what we can allow, not what we can understand.

My feelings for our "First Loves" are just that, my opinions. But what I feel I should address is never will I be able to tell a young adult or teenage person that having an online relationship other then good friends is a good idea. First I should say is other than friendship there really is no other relationship that could exist online, if there is love then it will need to take the natural course and become a reality, this is more then what I feel should take place between people that have not finished high school.

I would like to say to the teenage people reading this page is...Find friends online and use the internet for school work ,do not use this as a place to meet and involve yourself in love with people that you can not see or that the possibility of meeting is not going to happen. As a parent myself, I would have to tell you I would not allow any of my children to become so involved they would want to meet or even call someone they have talked to in a chat room.

Please don’t put yourself in the situation where you complicate your life anymore then what you have to deal with on an everyday basis. Go to the mall with your friends, talk to your parents, have fun at school dances and know that the real life relationships you have, should have more importance to you than relationships where the promise of love is not one spoken or seen in the eyes of the one professing the love, where long distance calls are having to be made and dates are impossibilities.

To those of you who have already become involved in online relationships you need to take a deep look into what you are really looking for and if my guess is right you will find what you are really looking for is not something you are going to find online, and what you find may only add to and create more problems then what you feel you are dealing with at the present time. You deal with issues we adults never had to deal with, though I guess every generation could say this and for every generation this is true. What has not really changed is as parents and the parents before us and the parents yet to be, we still want to help our children through as best as we can.

There really are reasons there are steps we need to follow in life, and it truly starts with learning to walk before we run, grade school before high school, and living life on our own before we share it with another. When one step is missed I feel you will continue to stumble until you put your life back in the order it was meant to be in. So when you write to me and speak of a love you feel for another person online and you are only 15, my question to you is going to be "are you really surprised" it isn’t working out? You can’t slow dance on a computer, you can’t go to a prom or hold hands on a computer and these things are important steps in life. Ones you should take, not dream about. Online relationships are the exception not the rule.

Zopop and I have only become a reality only because of the lesson we have learned in life and the wisdom that comes from living it.