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She places the cardboard man gently on the seat across from her, making sure his body folds neatly at the hip crease and that his legs dangle comfortably below him. Then she opens up her menu.

Joel Massey happened to be her waiter that night. "She was just a real normal-looking woman in her mid-40s," he says. Everything else was normal, too — it was just a typical Tuesday night at the popular San Francisco restaurant.

The woman called her companion Peter or Stan. She ordered an appetizer for herself and a halibut dish for Peter/Stan. She was probably a tourist; she wanted to take pictures with

...

Was Peter/Stan symbolic of a non-existent significant other or perhaps one she had lost? Was she playing a joke on the world around her? Was she nuts?

Whenever I write articles about Japanese men who have body pillow girlfriends or marry their video game girlfriends, a flood of comments about how crazy and f****ed up Japanese culture is inevitably follow. But this type of virtual relationship exists in the US, too. In September, NBC Miami reported on a woman who carries around a cardboard cutout of her soldier boyfriend, and Joel's testimony of the woman and Peter/Stan suggests that she's not the only one.

The idea of a person developing an emotional attachment to an object is easy to ridicule, but it's actually common. Whether the object of that affectionate bond is a teddy bear, a cardboard version of your hubby, or an imaginary character etched on a body pillow doesn't really matter. But within the spectrum of objects that people can have feelings for,

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http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/08/the-case-of-the-tour.html

That's the story of Schoenrock's relationship with his "girlfriend"

HEY-O!