It may be easy to dismiss this story with a laugh, but it would be unfair.

A married couple who didn’t realise they were chatting each other up on the Internet are divorcing.

Sana Klaric and husband Adnan, who used the names "Sweetie" and "Prince of Joy" in an online chatroom, spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles…

The truth emerged when the two turned up for a date. Now the pair, from Zenica in central Bosnia, are divorcing after accusing each other of being unfaithful.

"I was suddenly in love. It was amazing. We seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriage. How right that turned out to be," Sana, 27, said.

Adnan, 32, said: "I still find it hard to believe that Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years".

(from The Daily Telegraph)

Actually, the most common tag on del.icio.us for the story is "funny", and Marc Andreessen suggests that they should get divorced and then immediately remarry.

I am fascinated by the way technology intersected a deep problem of incommunicability and provided them a new chance to reconsider their relation: was there still something between them, under layers of disappointment and anger at each other? Or maybe, on the opposite, they were simply chasing an illusion, ready to make the same mistake once more?

That is none of my business, but there are so many lessons to be learnt about the way we elect a person to be a friend or a partner, and how much of that can be affected by our personal histories and, why not, by contingency.