Are you having an emotional affair with someone in your Twitter or Instagram DM, and you don’t care if he or she is married because you are “virtually in love”? Well, Oxygen Network can help you with that.
Oxygen Network’s new reality TV series, “Virtually in Love,” arranges face-to-face meetings with online couples who have never met in person.
Ken Cullins, 28, met his girlfriend, Ciera Springer, 26, online in 2010. The couple (pictured above) “dated” online for six long years before they finally met face-to-face in 2016, thanks to Oxygen.
In between their online romance, Springer, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, took a “break” to have a child with another man. But that didn’t deter Cullins, who lives in the Bronx.
“It takes a special kind of love to still wake up and keep this person in mind, because I haven’t seen her for all these years,” he said.
Cullins described meeting Springer for the first time in person.
“One of the first things I did was hug her and I smelled her hair … got the feel of actually touching her,” Cullins says. “It was cool to get those senses that I couldn’t experience before.”
33-year-old Iyanya Ukpong, a DJ from Brooklyn, met his girlfriend Maria Ahstrom, of Sweden, on Instagram. The couple fell hard for each other, sight unseen.
After “dating” online for seven months they learned of the show and signed up.
Even though Ahstrom looks older than her stated age of 33, the awkwardness of meeting for the 1st time “dissipated quickly,” according to the NY Post.
“You have all these emotions about this person, but you’re meeting them physically for the first time, so you don’t know how your body is going to react,” Ukpong said.
“Virtually in Love,” premieres Tuesday at 9 p.m on Oxygen.
