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It started as so many relationships do--the long phone calls, the movie dates, the tentative introductions to family and friends.
But Mark Passerby and Salwa Al-Saban were separated by the Atlantic Ocean, a time difference of seven hours and vast cultural contrasts. He lived in Lansing, Mich., she in Egypt's capital, Cairo.
They say they fell in love over Skype, a service that allows users to call each other free over the Internet. In November 2005, a month after they first "clicked" online, they married.
"Everyone around us thinks we're crazy," said Salwa, a 26-year-old doctor who just moved to Michigan and took her husband's name. "But it is much more perfect than anything I could have ever wanted."
Skype has spawned love connections between Belgians and Japanese, Germans and Israelis, Americans and Egyptians and even a Guatemalan nail technician and a Canadian.
The software routes phone calls over the Internet, substituting voice for instant messages. Web mail services such as Google, MSN and Yahoo also allow customers to make Net phone calls, but Skype has kept a few steps ahead by being one of the first to offer this for free.
Since it was founded in 2003, Skype has added voice mail and video communication. The service says it has more than 100 million users.
At first, Skype was used mostly by people who already knew each other: spouses on business trips, camp friends and college students. Then specialized dating Web sites discovered Skype, and its role as a matchmaker started growing.
On most online dating sites, singles send messages to one another, but "it takes an awful long time for them to find out if they're compatible," said David Finlay, the co-owner of SomeoneNew.com, a 14,000-member dating site. Finlay says that by using Skype, people on his Web site are able to determine whether they're compatible after one or two phone calls.
"The natural thing to do is to talk to one another, not to type," he said. "It's a little bit of nostalgia here; we're actually speaking to each other again."
After discussing their shared interests online (caving, crying during romantic movies, pop music), Salwa and Mark began to operate on the same sleep schedule. Mark, a 41-year-old technology developer for real estate firm ReMax, set up a movie projector and trained his Web camera on it so they could watch movies together.
He soon bought a ticket to Egypt to meet Salwa, and they were married on his first trip after they convinced her conservative family that he was a suitable match for her.
There is something in the idea that people get closer by speaking on the phone, said Nancy Baym, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas.
That's what appealed to Marcel Janneteau, a 41-year-old from Montreal.
Janneteau, who gets tested in medical experiments for a living and is a member of the Raelians, a religious group whose members believe in UFOs as well as human cloning, said he had gotten "burned" when he had been communicating with a woman online who put up false photos of herself and pretended she was a millionaire.
From then on, he decided to require that anyone he dated over the Internet have a Web camera and a microphone so he could see and hear that she was for real. He soon found Mimi Quan, a 42-year-old nail technician in Guatemala.
Quan said she felt secure because she knew that if Janneteau made her uncomfortable, "I can just turn the computer off" and stop talking to him, something that is harder to do when dating in person.
They have never met in person but talk over Skype four hours a day and watch each other sleep using Web cameras. He has met her three children over Skype; she has invited him to visit Guatemala.
Some psychologists say a relationship created and sustained by Net phone can be incomplete.
Net phone contact is "simultaneously allowing people to become more intimate and yet have less patience with real life and real-time human fumbles and foibles," said Linda Young, a psychologist at Seattle University who has counseled many students who have sustained or developed relationships over Skype.
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