Romance over the internet that leads to marriage is posing a new headache for the courts when relationships go sour, a senior judge said yesterday.

Lord Justice Thorpe was ruling in favour of a mother who wants to take her two young daughters back home to Texas after a “brief and stormy” marriage to a British man she met online.

Allan Foster, 45, from Carterton, Oxfordshire, made contact with his bride-to-be Sonya, from Eagle Pass, Texas, via a website in June 2000.

Three months later they met in person when she arrived in Britain, and they were married a year later.

Mrs Foster, 35, already had a daughter, Caitlin, now 7, who came to regard Mr Foster as her father, and the couple had a daughter of their own, Jacklyn, in January 2002.

But their marriage, which lasted less than four years, was described at the Court of Appeal as unhappy and the separation as “very acrimonious with allegations on both sides”.

The judge said: “Cases in which the parties meet through the internet are becoming increasingly common in these courts. The internet is originating cross-country relationships, cross-country marriages and cross-country parenting.”

He added: “When the cross-country family disintegrates, there will be a reversion to the parental countries of origin with consequential problems over maintaining parental relationships and contact.”

Lord Justice Thorpe said that he agreed with Mrs Justice Hogg, who had ruled for Mrs Foster in April after hearing that she would be “devastated” if she could not return to Texas, that the mother should be allowed to relocate in the interests of the children. “An unhappy mother often means unhappy children,” he said.

Mr Foster took the case to the Court of Appeal, where three judges ruled yesterday that they could not alter the decision of the High Court, which was “not open to challenge or criticism”.

Lord Justice Thorpe, giving the ruling of the court, said that the mother had been described as “responsible and resourceful” by Mrs Justice Hogg who had dismissed argument that she would not be able to cope on her own in Texas.

Mrs Foster said that she would not take her children to the United States until they had finished their school term.

Fiona Hay, representing the father, who was not in court, had told the judges that the High Court judge did not deal in any detail with the effect that removal would have on the children’s relationship with the father.

“She observed that the children loved him and that the proposed contact arrangements were for internet contact as well as direct contact.”

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