The internet had always been Lizzie's friend.

As early as sixth grade, she and Charlotte logged into AIM on Lizzie's family's brand new dial-up connection. The internet was less scary back then. Talking to strangers was a novelty, not a danger (of course, they never told their parents). No one talked about hacking or malware. With a screen name like soccerchicks12 and no bandwidth for sharing photos, anonymity was a security blanket they never fully appreciated.

This was especially so for to two dorks with nothing better to do than dominate AOL chat rooms about the upcoming Lord of the Rings movie

For Lizzie, it was love at first connection. She could sneak in 15 minutes before her mother realized the phone was off the hook, but for those short, 15 minutes she was transported away from the crazy household. In that fleeting window she was able to find like-minded people with opinions about her favorite stories. She could briefly forget that Lydia had run up to their neighbor Bryce and told him all about Lizzie's secret crush.

Of course, that was only the beginning.

Along came broadband, Neopets, self-taught HTML, MySpace, a vendetta against MySpace, LiveJournal communities, an addiction to Mugglenet and a YouTube subscription list that grew and grew and grew.

All her young life, she had taken information from the internet in exchange for bits and pieces of herself; her time, her devotion, personal facts on message boards, her interests listed on profiles. She even formed a few tenuous friendships in spite of geography and differing time zones.

Lizzie absorbed it all and barely paused before registrating for all mass communications classes her freshman year of college.

It was impossible to mark the moment the real world and her Internet world became one. While she had always lived with one foot online, there was a conscious separation and her online world was hers alone. In her zeal to post the first Lizzie Bennet Diaries video, Lizzie didn't consider how carefully she had compartmentalized the two or how precarious the separation might be.

Yes, she framed the videos as a school project that concerned Lizzie Bennet alone. She really had planned to provide her perspective only, just as any traditional diary would.

But then Lydia's intrusions provided conflict (no matter how much they annoyed Lizzie) and Jane was a sounding board that provided the sort of depth Charlotte had been concerned about. The results were too good to give up. They had an audience. Lizzie was producing material that others responded to. They were contributing to the greater internet.

She felt good about what she was doing. A small part of her had worried she would always be a Rob Gordon for the internet age. You know, the same guy from "High Fidelity" who said:

"I guess I think I've always been a professional critic or some sort of professional appreciator or something. And I just wanted to do something new, put something new out into the world, you know, kind of really put my money where my mouth is."

Lizzie had finally put her money where her mouth was. But she had never expected it to come to this; Her family in crisis and the alienation of a man she could very well be in love with.

She had always been connected until suddenly she wasn't.

This is the story of how Lizzie broke up with the internet.