The world wide web (WWW) offers a space for the expansion of intimacy and interpersonal relations beyond one’s immediate locality. Transcultural international marriages are increasingly a feature of a globalizing world that exhibits ‘time-space compression’ (Massey 1994). Nonetheless, popular and scholarly accounts of web dating and internet mediated marriages challenge the possibility of establishing ‘real’ relationships in a text-based communication medium. Here it is presumed individuals can use artifice in the presentation of self, which is an inherent obstacle to developing the desired intimacy.  This paper reports on an anthropological study that explores the questing for partners, for relationships involving heterosexual emotional attachment  by way of the internet. It investigates the manner in which adult subjects pursue intimacy and attachment in the virtual community of the WWW. The study was conducted through a web site established for ‘Fil –West’ couples, interviews with couples who met via the internet, and ethnographic research with Asian Australian families in a number of  sites across Australia (only some of whom met via the internet). How do these couples narrate their experiences of negotiating issues of authenticity and trust in courtship, and establishing the  intimacy regarded as fundamental to conjugal relationships.