I think a married friend of mine is having an email love affair. She's got a wonderful partner and small daughter, but I think she's hooked on her new virtual man.

She has only ever met the guy once, but she is sending him about 200 emails a day and sounds well and truly smitten.

Every time I meet her, she gives me a blow-by-blow account of their flirtatious exchanges on that particular day. When she told me he feels like a brother, like a soulmate and a close friend, I started to fear for her sanity.

It all started when she got in touch with him over a work related thing - he was a friend of a friend and she liked something he'd written so much she wrote to tell him. He wrote back a polite thank you email and I thought it would all end there.

But no. Two months later, he is emailing her from California when he is on work trips and she is staying up until 2am to send him a 2,000 word email on I don't know what.

She insists there's nothing improper but I have my suspicions. After all, you can get pretty close to another human being writing 2,000 word monologues. Every intimate detail, I should think.

Perhaps I'm just too cynical but I think it could be a reaction to where her real life relationship is at the moment. She's been with this guy for over ten years and everytime I go round I'm in awe of what looks like their great friendship. But her email man maybe gives her the highs of a new and thrilling relationship that her comfy friendship with her partner can never provide.

It all reminds me of the time I got involved with a married man. Not involved in a physical sense, but a virtual, email sort of way. It began as work friendship and then, when I left the office, turned into an everyday email sort of thing.

He was a great emailer - funny and clever with emails that cheered up my day. I began to get hooked on his messages and we began reeling off emails like we were writing an e-novel. I would get reams from him and respond with the story of my life.

This emailing business can really indulge the self-obssessive side of you. It is not exactly an exchange between friends and can run the risk of being a series of me, me, me monologues in which you mistakenly think you're getting to know someone really well, when it's actually yourself you're getting more familiar with. My email affair ended horribly.

After a few fearfully aborted real meetings, my virtual lover broke it off after I announced that I liked someone real whom I could actually speak to rather than type to and who was also, essentially, unmarried. He said he was deeply wounded by what must have seemed to him to be my betrayal and I felt pained and guilty on my part. Reality eventually interrupted our weird make-belief fling, like it is bound to do for my friend.