Going to the CyberChapel

Ever been involved in a hot, sweaty chat-room discussion and felt the need to take the relationship to the next level? Now, there’s a place you can go--at least one that we can write about in a family newspaper.

It’s called CyberChapel, where a couple of Web surfers can commit to each other in a completely public and utterly nonbinding way. It works like this: One person enters his or her Internet marriage proposal and submits it to https://www.internetmarriage.com. For a fee, the folks at CyberChapel in turn contact your intended.

If the answer is yes, you’re officially engaged! However, the couple must wait at least one week before tying the Internet knot. Your engagement and marriage (if you don’t get cold feet) will be posted along with the many other recent marriages and engagements on the Web site, which launched Feb. 14. (Incidentally, Valentine’s Day is the day on which most marriages occur.)

If CyberChapel sounds like fantasy land to you, it’s not. The folks there know, even in the world of Internet relationships, that things don’t always work out. So, the site also allows couples married at CyberChapel to get divorced. (But that filing will take two weeks. The bureaucracy moves slowly, even online.)