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"Jesus, just because I don`t fancy every girl I meet, that doesn`t make me gay."
She looked smug. "And, by the same argument, not fancying every boy you meet doesn`t make you straight."
There was a really long silence.
"Holy shit," gasped Sanee. "That`s a really scary thought."
"I can imagine it would be to a lot of people, but actually there`s nothing scary about rejecting heteronormative notions of binary sexuality."
"So you`re saying," said Drew slowly, "I could be gay and not know it? Because that sort of sounds like bollocks."
Tinuviel pushed her hair out of her eyes. "No, I`m not saying that, Andrew. I`m saying that, for many people, sexuality is more fluid and less clear-cut than they`re taught to assume. You might, in fact, be completely straight, but it`s also possible that you`re not. And, even if you aren`t, you might have gone your whole life completely happy and not caring and not knowing. And that`s fine. But it seems to me that right now you have an opportunity to have something with somebody, and it might work or it might not, but if your only reason for not trying is that you`re scared of the idea of being gay, then that`s probably quite silly and a little bit sad."

"The way I see it, when you meet someone in" — she did air quotes — "'real life,' all your initial assumptions about them are based on their physical appearance, but these are extremely likely to be ignorant, prejudiced, and misleading. When you meet somebody online, your initial impressions of them are based on what they say to you. This can`t be any more misleading, and it`s only social conditioning that makes you accept the validity of relationship initially based on nothing but physical response. Online relationships are based on intellectual and emotional connection. If anything, it`s a better way of doing it."

"I`ve kind of met this girl on the internet."
She poured water onto her noodles and mashed them down. "We do walk amongst you."
One of the things Drew found slightly harder to take about Tinuviel was that he couldn`t always tell when she was joking. "I think I really like her, and she goes to Leicester, so she`s close, so it`s like possible, but... I only met her a week ago, and like on the internet, so I feel like a crazy person."
"Why does that make you feel like a crazy person?"
"Well, it`s the internet. And I don`t really know who she is or if she really exists."
"Do you know if anybody really exists?"
Drew sighed. "That`s kind of the opposite of helpful, T."
She curled up on the rug, with her noodles cradled in her lap, like a strange, redheaded Yoda. "Well, I think what you`ve got to remember is that we all sort of construct ourselves based on the identity we want to present to other people, so, in a very real sense, nobody can ever know anybody.:
"Still not helping."