Clicking online was not so great

"My dogs don't tell me I'm fat; my dogs don't say I'm having an affair when I go swimming; my dogs don't phone me in the middle of the night or say I'm wearing too much make-up," says Heather.

These, she says, are all aspersions that her husband, American Mike Daum or "American Mike" as she calls him, used to cast in her general direction during their two-year marriage.

When Heather "met" Mike in cyberspace, everything seemed perfect. They would "chat" for hours online and before long she was flying to Baltimore in the States to meet her man in the flesh, something which only cemented her belief that here was Mr Right.

"At first I thought I was stupid to travel 3,000 miles to meet someone I had never seen in person," she says.

"But it was so right. I got the collywobbles at Birmingham Airport and I said to my friend Sarah 'what am I doing'?"

Any doubts, however, evaporated when Mike tapped her on the shoulder with the words "Hi, hun". Heather describes the moment as being like a scene from Gone With The Wind.

After a week with American Mike it was time to come home and, wrapped in each other's arms in the airport departure lounge, the pair were inconsolable.

"It was horrible," she recalls at her home in Stirchley, Telford. "We cried our eyes out at the airport."

It was a whirlwind romance. They'd only just met but on September 20, 2003, they were married in Worfield with the full works: church, white dress and, of course, her favourite dog Rosie. The first dance was to You're the Best Thing, by the Style Council.

"It was the wedding night, at the party," she says. "One of my friends turned up - he's 58 or 59 - and he came up and got hold of me, said 'you look lovely' and gave me a kiss.

"It was the kiss of a friend, but then Mike came round the corner . . . the next morning he would not speak to me."

The whirlwind romance was already turning into a full-blown hurricane. Heather describes her then-husband as moody and argumentative.

Their honeymoon involved travelling around the country by car. "With me driving the whole way and him moaning - that's when he was talking at all," she says.

"If I gave him the moon on a stick it would be the wrong moon. It was like Jekyll and Hyde. Everyone knew him as 'American Mike, what a great guy'. But not at all."

The plan was for Heather to up sticks and live with her husband in America, but with Heather in Blighty waiting for her visa to come through and Mike working as a field engineer across the Atlantic, she was back talking to her man the way she liked best - on the internet.

They each had webcams set up and would conduct the early part of their marriage this way, with "grandma walking past in the background with a cup of tea and waving".

Heather laughs. "I was supposed to get made up and wear a frock with my hair all done for a night of talking on the internet," she says.

"Then he'd say 'where have you been dressed like that - you've got make-up on'. You could not do right for doing wrong."

And with the time difference, she would have to chat in the dead of night.

"I'm not going to say I could not go out but it was easier if I didn't," she adds.

Meeting a lover on the internet - and it leading to a such a hasty marriage and equally hasty divorce - there was almost bound to be a chorus of "I-told-you-sos".

"People can lie on the internet but they can also lie face to face," she says. "I still think the internet is brilliant if everyone is honest with each other.

Comfort blanket

"It's safe, you are in your own home - it's like a comfort blanket. And it's a lot easier on the internet to deal with rejection. On the internet it's 'ta-ra'."

And that, for her, was what it was. Fearing a torrent of abuse if she told her husband face to face, she decided that ditching him by e-mail was better all round. One click of a button and Mike was history.

As Heather says: "I got married for life, not for Christmas."

After weeks of arguing in cyberspace, Mike agreed to a divorce on the grounds of his unreasonable behaviour. The papers came through this time last year and Heather is now celebrating her first anniversary of being single again.

And she's loving it. "It's great. I can do what I like, when I like. I can even go out!"

And she always has her Jack Russell "pedigree mongrels" for company.

"To think I was not going to take them with me if I moved to the States," she says. "I would not swap them for him. Never."

By Ben Bentley