When you buy a woman off the Internet, you don't really expect the two of you will live happily ever after.

That's why I was shocked to find myself talking on the phone for nearly an hour to a woman on a Pacific island whom I had purchased for $40 just three months earlier.

First, let me back up. Let me try -- try -- to explain.

In April, I came across the web site www.ImaginaryGirlfriends.com. I paid $40 to be guaranteed e-mail correspondence with Anaiis, a beautiful 21-year-old who said she was from Honolulu. In my June 29 column, I wrote that my larger goal was to woo Anaiis over e-mail, make her want to be my real girlfriend and get her to fly me to Honolulu.

"But something happened on the way to the tropical sex party," I wrote. "Call it pathetic, weird or beautiful. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with my imaginary girlfriend."

Anaiis's writing style and intelligence (and the posted pictures in which she's scantily clad) made me gaga for this Internet fantasy. But I knew very, very little about Anaiis. She wrote something about being a reporter, but it sounded inconceivable.

Just another part of the fantasy, I figured.

So after the story ran in the paper, I tried to forget about her; another one to pencil into the loss column, I guess.

Then, two weeks later, my phone rang.

I knew from the moment I heard her accent it was her. Half Peruvian and half Japanese, she spoke as I had imagined she would.

But I was dumbfounded that she was actually on the phone and shocked that she had actually called. I tried my best to put on my most confident speaking voice.

Her name, of course, is not Anaiis. It is Cris. And although she spends time in Honolulu, she was calling me from Saipan, an American island in the Northern Mariana Islands near the Philippines.

This was a real person, after all. This wasn't some middle-aged weirdo behind a bank of computer screens getting paid to pretend he was a sex goddess (despite the theories of skeptical readers).

She was real. Really real. Talking-to-me-on-the-phone real.

But was she real enough to be my real girlfriend?

Cris acknowledged she had checked prices on plane flights to Philadelphia.

Am I still imagining?

And she told me this: She is a reporter, too, and even wrote a column about her experiences as my imaginary girlfriend. 

The next day, I got an e-mail from a woman in Saipan who said she could confirm Cris was real: "You do not know me and I do not know you. But I do know a truly amazing love story when I see one . . . it would be a shame if she was the one and you let her go because you met her on an Imaginary Girlfriend site."

This woman also sent me a link to the column Cris wrote in the Saipan Tribune under the headline "The Surreal World of an Imaginary Girlfriend." (Check it out at http://www.saipantribune.com/newsstory.aspx?cat=4&newsID=38906).

In the beginning, Cris wrote, she would send her imaginary boyfriends "saucy little letters and would copy-paste them to all my boyfriends."

But Matt Katz demanded more, she wrote, adding, "These e-mails were almost like little dates, dates you could do in pajamas and for which you didn't have to spend half your salary getting a mani-pedi and Brazilian bikini wax."

A mani-pedi, apparently, is a manicure-pedicure and a Brazilian bikini wax is, well, if you don't know than I probably shouldn't be the one to tell you.

Wow! Even when Cris is writing in a newspaper she's turning me on.

Meeting women on the Internet is strange enough. And having that little affair play out in newspapers thousands of miles apart enters the realm of the bizarre.

But to have this actually work out would be absolutely legendary. A love story that could only be constructed in the age of the Internet.

Cris's column concluded: "Guess what, Mr. Katz? I'm real. And you have finally made the news with more than a byline. Now if you want to give this a shot, let me know. Just three more sessions as an IG (Imaginary Girlfriend) and I'll be able to pay the airfare."

I'm picturing TV cameras filming our little meeting at the airport. Anyone have Oprah's number? She would eat this up.

I already checked out flights to Saipan: $2,961, with a layover in Japan. Now all we need is a rich benefactor. Then, maybe we'll live happily ever after as the soul mates that our reader in Saipan thinks we are.

Imagine that . . .

This column appeared in the Courier-Post.