Personally, I have a bunch of friends in different places, some of whom I've never met, but most of them I try to make a point of meeting, even if I'm going to interact with them primarily online; it real-personifies them for me and that's valuable. I know not everyone does this.

There's certain advantages to never meeting IRL. I've had amazing tinysex partners kinda stop working for me due to meeting them in the flesh. My current virtual inamorata makes rather a point of not talking much about hir RL, and at this point I'm fine with that - I do care about the person behind the text stream, I worry about a few things that make it through from behind the mask, but I don't want to risk ruining what is frankly totally fucking amazing ts.