Had a relationship of a good few years with a gal I met rping (nonsexually initially, but we did lewd on occasion). It fell apart when the reality struck us that neither of us were in an economic position to make long-distance work. Only met her in person once, and that was after we split. After that we drifted apart as friends as our interests changed and eventually fell out of contact. Bit by bit, she stopped being the person I fell in love with, and I didn't realize it until the last time we talked.
I still think fondly on the games we played, but now that I look back on it I tried way too hard to make myself personally responsible for her happiness. I was the white knight, and it didn't pay out. Came kinda close though, but in hindsight I realize I'm not the right person to deal with her kind of needs and going further than we did would have upped the ante beyond my ability to pay if the cards came up wrong (and the fact that she had shitty parents, shitty therapists and shitty drugs didn't seem to help, though that may have been her depression speaking for her).
The last straw though was a fight we had where she seemed to have altered her own memory. She brought up a (post-relationship) incident where she claimed I talked her into being a model for a BDSM photoshoot that would be posted on a fetish site. As I remember it, she decided to link me that photoset on her own, about a year after the photos were actually taken. Until that point, I didn't even know of her involvement on fetlife. It's beside the point that I would have approved anyway, especially since her beau at the time was a borderline-abusive douchenut.
She's married now. I sincerely hope she's happy with who she wound up with.
Still hasn't given me commissioned art I paid for though. If you're on this board, (kinda doubt it, but plausible) you know exactly who you are.
There was another "relationship" where I'd been playing on and off with a partner for a few years. He was under the impression I was a grill irl, and for some stupid reason I decided to keep playing that part. It eventually boiled up to a point where he said to me, more or less, that if I wasn't gonna go further with him he was gonna stop wasting his time with me. I responded by telling him he may as well start looking elsewhere because I was a guy behind the screen and maintaining the role was taking a toll on me. To my surprise, he was actually into traps and that kept him going for a bit.
But I guess I still wasn't interesting enough because we stopped talking. Fickle cunt.
So long story short I suppose my outlook is that it's possible, and it very well could lead to some happiness for some time, but you always have to remember that the person you're talking to could well be very different from the person you think you're talking to, even at its most unintentional or its most benign.