Perhaps over the Net, your sweetie seemed so quiet and shy, but is loud and a braggart instead. Sure, you can and will learn a huge amount of information about this person beforehand. One of the beautiful things about the Net is the fact that you can learn about people in their 'purest form', by how they talk and think, before you are forced to consider their appearance, mannerisms, and quirks of personality. But unfortunately, mostly it doesn't work like that. In the end, there will always be something unknown and unknowable about that person until you meet for real, and that might be a huge stumbling block.
Some people here can testify to that.
You should be willing to take a step back and look at yourself and your behavior. Then you may have just fallen into a bad net.romance. News software is notoriously unreliable. Sometimes a post never makes it out to the world in general, and sometimes it can be delayed by several days - up to two weeks or even more. If the post exists on one machine, there is no guarantee whatsoever that it exists anywhere else.