This is an Internet love story. Or a 19th-century Internet love story, if such a proposal can be imagined. Thankfully, it bears little resemblance to those late-'90s Internet love stories in which a beautiful 18-year-old with a fondness for exercise and thrilling sexual encounters meets a 25-year-old man just about to embark on a modelling career. After delicious chat-room coversation and an exchange of gorgeous pictures, a face-to-face meeting makes certain truths painfully clear: In her case, 18 means 38; a fondness for fitness means one dusty tai bo video; an interest in thrilling sex is closer to desperate loneliness. For him, a modelling career turns out to be a job as a BC Hydro line installer.

No, the strangest element of the following love story is its total lack of subterfuge. The two people in it are, honestly, in their mid-30s.

One half of the couple is Dean Allen, a 35-year-old Vancouverite who has designed some of the more memorable books on the Canadian scene, including Michael Turner's Hard Core Logo.

The woman he loves is named Gail Armstrong -- or, as she would put it, "La femme qu'il aime s'appelle Gail Armstrong," for she is a translator of French, a woman from Toronto who, after spending more than a decade in Paris, moved with her two children to a 300-year-old house near Pompignan, a tiny town in the south of France.

But before giving a more detailed description of their idyllic life together, which is known to include dancing around the house to Velvet Underground records, it's necessary to roll the story back to examine the Internet manoeuvring that brought them together.

Even though I've never met Dean or Gail, I was lucky enough to play a minor part at the beginning, perhaps comparable to that of a stagehand pulling a few greased levers behind the curtain.

In the spring of 2000, I helped former Saturday Night magazine editor Paul Tough to construct a Web site that would eventually be called Open Letters (www.openletters.net). Every day from June 19, 2000, to Jan. 5, 2001, it published a dispatch from someone, somewhere in the world. These letters were meant to offer a new way of looking at personal journalism. The site was full of "immediate, direct, first-person writing about the present."

It was never mentioned -- not even in passing, not even as a joke -- that a corollary of the project might be some sort of intercontinental introduction service. ("We thought that Open Letters would take readers places they'd never been. We just didn't expect it to happen literally," Tough said recently.)

Dean's involvement with the Web site started innocently enough. On Nov. 27, 2000, the site carried an open letter called "Someone's Big Day," which he had written about his 60-year-old mother's wedding.

He mentioned driving to the ceremony with "a thrumming hangover, feeling conspicuously dateless," but the piece was not a cry for someone to save him from his bachelor existence. There were no hints that he was living in a one-bedroom apartment in the West End, with, in his own words, "a very crunchy kitchen floor."

The letter was about family reconciliation. It ended with the image of Dean plunking away at a Foo Fighters song on a guitar with his brother, who hadn't spoken to him since the previous December, accompanying him on air drums.

Following its appearance, "Someone's Big Day" drew interest from several corners of the world. Modern Maturity, which calls itself "America's largest-circulation magazine," wanted to reprint it for its greying subscribers.

More importantly, though, a few months later it caught the interest of a woman in the south of France, who found herself sitting at her computer, procrastinating. She began idly looking through the Open Letters archive. Luckily, Dean Allen's was the first name on the list of contributors.

She clicked on it, began reading "Someone's Big Day" and was suitably impressed.

"The voice was compelling," she says over the phone from the 300-year-old house. "It was pitched somewhere between brash and humble. I just felt a resonance with it that was rare."

Eventually, Gail closed Dean's letter. Elle est retourn�e � son travail. But she continued to read the site whenever she wasn't teaching at a local school, raising her two children or buying fresh cheese and fine wine in the village.

On one visit to Open Letters, Gail found a link to Dean's cleanly designed personal Web sites, www.cardigan.com and www.textism.com, on which he rants and raves about font choices and turgid newspaper columnists. She began reading them, mostly for the voice she had heard in the open letter.

At the time, Dean was posting a series of satirical advice columns called WWCD? (What Would Conrad Do?) Questions were posed to ex-National Post proprietor Conrad Black and were then answered in his grandiloquent, polysyllabic style.

Gail, who had never before responded to something like this, sent an e-mail on Jan. 27, 2001. Her complaint had nothing to do with Dean's tendency to refer to Black as a "power-horny revisionist train wreck of narcissism." Rather, it was his flagrant use of acronyms that got to her.

Her first letter, titled "Shame on You," began: "Dear Mr. Allen. Yeah, shame on you. I've just come across your Web site via the -- alas -- now-defunct Open Letters and, though I enjoyed it thoroughly, truly I was disheartened by your use of acronyms (WWCD, etc.).

"[You use them] for reasons of brevity, no doubt; in jest, surely. Nevertheless ... you're setting a bad example, boy! (2 B or not 2 B th@ is the ?; pls call W.S. ASAP w/ ans.) Aiding and abetting the spread of the plague: acronym-itis, that dreaded disease of our time..."

Gail's e-mail sat inert in Dean's in-box for a couple of days. He was in the grip of a "gruesome, bedridden, NyQuil-soaked flu." (According to him, he's "had a cold since 1982.")

Finally, at 10:30 p.m. on Jan. 29, Gail opened up a message that read: "Pardon the delay in getting back to you. I am, as you'd expect, fairly overrun with clever, entertaining and funny notes from women living in France, and, to be fair, can only reply in the order in which these notes arrive."

The peacock plumes were slowly unfurling. From then on, each new message appeared with its share of dashing word play. Like two hairdressers circling each other, scouting for good texture, like a heavy-metal couple thumbing through each other's record collections in search of early Black Sabbath, here were two language fetishists feeling out each other's sentence structure from afar.

"We were being way too clever," Dean admits.

At 11 p.m. on Feb. 1, after he had sent out a particularly saucy dispatch, Gail decided to reply with over-the-top cleverness. Even to the unobservant eye, her reply was a sweeping display of alliteration.

"All right, you peevish, pugnacious, paperback pundit," her first volley began. "Pertinaciously pronouncing pro-pretty-print panegyrics, perpetuating perishing panda puns, prizing perfervid pedestrian performances, parading pithy playwrights' petulant paronomasia, plagiarizing pleasure palette penman's passion plight..."

This went on for 27 more p-words, all to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary and all used perfectly grammatically.

"I suppose that's when I first became really interested in Gail," Dean says.

He was not the first, and neither will he be the last person to fall in love in a flurry of words on the Internet. He wasn't even the only Vancouverite, or the only West End resident.

"One night, I had dinner with a couple named Caterina and Stewart," he says. "They both run Web sites, and they had a long romance. They figured their correspondence was the best ever."

Stewart Butterfield, one half of that couple, says: "I do tend to think that all my corresponence is particularly sparkling."

Caterina Fake explains what took place in their e-mail missives: "Stewart promised me a 15-per-cent increase in my over-all happiness per annum, compounded biannually. He offered to make a PowerPoint presentation, outlining the benefits that would accrue to me. He even got his ex-girlfriend in Boston to e-mail me a testimonial."

But I digress. Undeterred by the creative initiatives of others, Dean and Gail kept up the pace of their e-mails, never doubting that the Allen-Armstrong correspondence had its own unique charm.

Questions came next. One of Dean's messages ended with an entire string, including: "What's your favourite term of insult? What is your pen of choice? Slippers or woolly socks? If woolly socks, do you ever contemplate playing Ukrainian indoor floor hockey on hardwood floors?"

Gail answered them all and sent back a list of her own.

"It continued like that for a time," she recalls. "It was becoming increasingly complex and beguiling, with digressions and lovely thoughts late at night."

Dean worked lone-wolf style, without a confidant. Gail shared a few highlights from the correspondence with her translation colleagues in nearby Montpellier. After hearing these, her friends insisted that she get herself to Vancouver.

All that time, not a single JPEG was sent. No photographic representation passed from person to person.

"There were vague descriptions," says Gail. "He mentioned he had really handsome feet."

It didn't matter that their words sometimes slipped to a level of Grade 6 sap-o-rama, or even that they both tended to write dialogues with themselves on their Web sites. Language was paramount. The gentle toss of e-mails across the Atlantic slowly increased in frequency.

Authenticity was never questioned. "I was never worried about her being some 55-year-old evil-genius psycho in Baltimore," says Dean. The electronic world, usually such a great place to construct false identities, was stripped back down to a simple delivery medium. "Paper would have been just the same," says Dean, "except it wouldn't have been quite as speedy."

Throughout the e-mailing phase of the romance, Dean continued to live as a "freelance jerk-off with a miserable life, in general." It wasn't just the kitchen floor. It wasn't just the way he would become so livid, while reading Leah McLaren's Saturday column in The Globe and Mail, that he would shout out in frustration in restaurants.

"Maintaining the momentum you need to run your own business is very hard," he explains. "I had all these hopes and dreams of publishing stuff. Instead, I was just lurching through life."

By the beginning of April, his lurching had atrophied. The entries on his Web site took on a precarious tone. "An adult male living alone," he wrote on April 9, "stops being a vaguely tragicomic bachelor once he is found in the circumstance of simultaneously taking a whiz and eating a sandwich."

Fortunately, before Dean could start eating entire meals in the bathroom, the last act began to unfold.

The deus ex machina kicked in. From out of the sky, Gail, who had been on BA Flight 85, was lowered into Vancouver airport just in time for Easter weekend, a mere three days after the sandwich incident.

In preparation, Dean posted a dialogue with himself on Textism: "I'm teaching -- last class, tests and all. Her hotel is a few blocks from the university; I'm walking over afterward, at 9. So she traverses an ocean and a continent, takes a cab, checks into the hotel, has an hour or so to freshen up, then... Yes. What're you bringing? Flowers and a book. Are you nervous or excited? I can't see straight."

Gail had found alternate care for her children and granted herself a few free days. "He was going to just come up [and meet me at the hotel]. The entire time, I was thinking, Do I wait inside or stand outside the room?"

She checked into the Listel on Robson. It's a "boutique" hotel, so there are no sweetheart rooms, no heart-shaped Jacuzzis.

Just after nine, Dean arrived, wearing what he calls his "usual mid-century fading hepcat shtick," which included a snap-brim hat that no one likes, except him.

Gail, meanwhile, was in her room listening to the radio and watching TV at the same time. She stood up to turn down the lights. Then she sat down again.

"Then I stood up, then I sat down, had a smoke, brushed my teeth again, had a glass of wine, brushed my teeth -- and gasped when the phone rang."

It was reception.

"Dean is here," the voice at the other end said. "May I send him up?"

In the following minutes, Gail's internal inside-the-room/outside-the-room debate reached a climax. She merged the two options and stood in the doorway. She was wearing a dark blue floral-print dress and heels.

"I knew he was really tall," she explains.

Having got the go-ahead from reception, Dean padded his way toward the room. "There are those situations where you're walking down a hall into something that you know is going to change your life forever," he says. "Something in you just surges, and you've suddenly got this mounting music that comes into your head."

He was tuned to his own frequency.

"Typically, we have jazz piped throughout the building," says Jim Mockford, the hotel's general manager. "We're known as one of Vancouver's premier jazz venues."

Dean passed by the display case near the elevator and walked along the rather stark hallway. Finally he stood in front of Gail, briefcase in hand.

"Hi," she said from the doorway.

"Hello," he replied.

The Listel's room-service menu is crammed with dishes like the B.C. smoked salmon scramble, with scallions, toasted bagel, cream cheese and fresh fruit, and the pan-fried Fanny Bay oysters with tempura vegetables and spicy lemon butter. Room-service employees are known for their hospitality. "Guests who stay for a few days become quite friendly with the attendants," says Mockford. "The staff is always good at picking up on people's names."

Gail agrees. "We got to know room service very well."

Four months later, halfway through Vancouver's summer, anyone walking down the alley behind the one-bedroom bachelor apartment at 1860 Haro St. would have come across a large Pioneer VSX-604S home theatre amp with no remote. If someone were able to lug it away, as someone eventually did, it would have been fine. No theft charges would have been laid because Dean would then have been minus one more possession and one step closer to making his move around the world.

Gail flew to Vancouver again in June, for his birthday.

"Somewhere in between those two visits, there was the idea, What if I just chucked everything?" Dean says.

Suddenly, he found himself committing the ultimate act of graphic-design sacrifice. He took steps to get rid of his scanner and his high-volume 600-dpi laser printer. On one of his Web sites, he posted an entire list of items he wanted to sell. There he was, an urban professional, laying down the tools of his trade.

Perhaps his Newton keyboard ($65 -- sold) and iBook ($1,450 -- sold) wouldn't have been put up for sale so quickly if Gail had been living in Duncan or just past the Ricky's restaurant in Scarborough, Ont.

The words "south of France" have romance embedded in them. When Dean was able to preface them with, "A beautiful woman I am in love with lives in the...," that proved to be the deciding factor.

So off they went. He jettisoned his Palm Pilot Pro ($50 -- sold) and his Linotype Saphir Ultra SCSI scanner ($450 -- sold).

The way Gail wrote about Pompignan on her Web site, www.openbrackets.com, made it sound as if it were populated by quirky cast members of the sequel to Am�lie.

More incentives arrived in packages. The photos Gail sent of the house looked as if they'd been clipped from Country Life. One even featured un hamac dans le jardin.

For the faint of heart or the recently divorced, a phone conversation with the two is not recommended. Their voices weave in and out on the speakerphone. They cannot, even in the name of good manners, mask the depth of their feeling for each other.

All it took to kick-start their romance was an unsuspecting online magazine, a letter, procrastination, some clever e-mails and a couple of trips to Vancouver, during which Vancouver was rarely glimpsed.

This is Internet love at its best: Two people who probably wouldn't meet in a nightclub, or in a caf� in Paris, or Rollerblading on the seawall, are brought together -- in this case, two people who find a suitable adverb just as sexy as a well-defined forearm.

On Aug. 29, 2001, Dean flew across the Atlantic and landed in London, where he was met by Gail at Heathrow Airport.

"We flew Air France to Paris." he wrote on Textism the next day. "Then to Montpellier, landing at 11 p.m. Bombing at midnight across the countryside in her decrepit Ford, grinning like fools, the air hot and rich, the streets narrow."

If he still had his Garmin GPS 11 hand-held global positioning device ($100 -- sold), he would have been able to pinpoint their position as they moved south. This was new territory: There were five vineyards in the town he was making his way toward; there were two children at the house where he'd be living, and the woman he loved was sitting in the driver's seat, navigating the small Ford home.

It was France and from here on in, everything would be different.

"I'm a little concerned," Dean wrote at the end of his entry, "about the sudden admiration I feel for the work of Jerry Lewis."

Craig Taylor writes for The Guardian in London, England. He is the editor of Anonymous Juice (www.anonymousjuice.com).