Right, I've been visiting this site for a long time and have been in doubt to register for quite a while, but I just had to reply to this topic since I have been thinking about this a lot. Prepare for a TL;DR.
First of all, if you ask a question like if you can 'love' someone 'over the internet', it depends on both your definition of love and whether you mean purely over the internet or both internet and IRL. As a psychology student I've actually read a lot of recent papers about love, and love itself seems to be more of a reaction to healthy communication combined with a desire to be with that person as much as possible.
'Love' over the internet happens way more often than IRL because with things like chat sites it's easy to type to many people at once, while in real life it's really rare to talk on a personal level with many people at once. So if you're both on the internet a lot, you keep thinking about each other and communicate quite carelessly and spontaneous, which is the base for most relationships. Also, there's possibly a desire for that person to be around you (or be online) and it's even possible for there to be physical attraction. So yes, it's quite possible to fall in love on the internet...
... However, you really have to meet in real life before any form of a real relationship can exist. If you're really serious about being together you're probably going to want to live in the same house, which is completely different from simply both having your own life and chatting a lot. No matter how well you click on the internet, real life could always be a disappointment.
As for a romance story - mine is probably one of the more unlikely ones: I was visiting a classmate of mine for fun and she was camming with a few other girls on some girls-only chatbox on tinychat, when one of the girls caught my eye and I started talking to her a bit.. in the end we exchanged MSN and from there we quickly developed a good friendship. The more we talked the more we liked each other and everything just went so naturally it was amazing. So she went to my place and I went to hers 3 weeks later (it's a 3,5 hour journey, so it's doable but really annoying). The only problem was that she had a boyfriend at first, but she actually broke up with him soon after we met. So now our friendship keeps improving and we joke around about love, sex & relationships a lot, but nothing official yet because of the distance I guess. I really do fancy her a lot, but 'truly loving her' is probably too strong. She plans to study at the same university I study at next year, so we're waiting for that to happen :]
Phew, now that I've got that out of my system I can go to bed in peace

if you're interested in even more (which I very much doubt) PM me
Don't worry, my posts are rarely over half as long as this one
