I always give similar advice to the online daters. I had some bad but mostly good dates and met my fiance on a dating website. But one thing your there to do is to MEET people. Yes, use common sense. They don't need to know where you live right away but people are just different in text and you can't get to know the real person via email and chats. I had a rule that once contact was initiated and we got past the first few questions and wanted to talk further I offered my number to get OFFLINE and move it into the real world. There is a lot of stuff you get from the voice and it saves you from wasting weeks hiding behind your PC until you think you can meet or actually hear a voice. If they end up being nuts - numbers can be changed or blocked. Live a little and in the process you save some time.

So the guy can't make any new friends unless they're male?? Or maybe incredibly ugly? He doesn't want to go out with the woman, he wants to invite her to dinner AT HOME WITH HIS WIFE!!! That says to me all he wants is a new friend AND he would like for his wife to be friends with her too.
How is it in this age women (and many men) are still so freakishly immature and insecure that they can't accept a friendship between people of opposite gender? If he wanted to fool around with this woman he wouldn't have introduced her to his wife and he sure as heck wouldn't want to invite her to dine with them.
Amy, you blew this one.

I disagree, moon - a married man brought me home and introduced me to his wife. We were just friends - until he confessed that he was in love with me and wanted to leave his wife for me. He brought me home because he was trying to convince himself (and his wife) that we could just be friends. Even good people get mixed up sometimes, especially when they aren't being vigilant about drawing a clear line between friends and something more. Being friends can turn into an emotional affair - this guy already admits that he and this girl really click and she's single and attractive - is that how he would describe a new guy friend he made? Probably not. He knows there is a potential problem, that's why he wrote.

I'm with Amy on this one, internet paranoia is rampant, and if a person isn't comfortable enough to share something as simple as a phone number after a week or so of e-mails and chats, they don't deserve your time. There was a time I also spent a week chatting with a person via e-mail, we developed what I thought was a great rapport, but when I brought up the subject of actually meeting for coffee, her response back was, essentially, that she was too scared to actually meet anyone off the internet (despite her profile explicitly saying that she liked meeting people at coffee shops...go figure!)

I responded to that paranoid e-mail with the simple statement, "I understand, and I know several other people who would be happy to vouch for my character. So what else would you like to know?"

And I never heard from her again.