Peoria -- Theodore Wooseley, an area retail clerk, has maintained a little-known three-year relationship with Tomb Raider star Lara Croft, sources say.

"It's true," said Wooseley in an exclusive interview. "I didn't mean for it to make the news, but I'm in love. I'm in love with Lara--her face, her skin, her... eyes... Did you see Tomb Raider Gold, with that little picture of her in a swimsuit on the side? They got my money, all right!"

A co-worker at Ed's Booketeria acknowledged the affair. "I've never seen her," he said, "but she must really be something. He goes on for hours sometimes. She's some kind of archeologist or something, and he always has all these crazy stories about her."

Lara Croft could not be reached for comment, but a spokesperson for Eidos Games, publisher of the popular Tomb Raider series, denied the substance of Wooseley's claims of a relationship. "A lot of people have strong feelings about Lara. She's strong, she's smart, she's sexy--God, is she sexy! But, the thing is, she's a computer game character. Unless he's talking about Angelina Jolie from the movie -- and we all know she doesn't quite, uh, stack up to the original -- Lara Croft is just programming and animated pixels. Either way, if this Wooseley guy is having sex, Lara is not involved."

Experts call Wooseley's one-sided relationship by its technical medical name: masturbation.

Doctor Harold Ickes, psychiatrist and expert in monosexual studies, warned against being too quick to condemn Wooseley's relationship with Lara Croft.

"Let's face it," said Ickes. "It hardly takes more than the very idea that something might be sexy to get most men going. This is the end of the twentieth century: cases of monosexual-related hysterical blindness are way down. With all the risks and complications of sex, monosexuality may become the relationship of choice, the self-help method, if you will, of the 2000s."

Other groups agree. "We believe that love, however expressed, is a beautiful thing," said Elliott Thorp, founder of the Convention for the Love of Animated Women, a group dedicated to the support of men who, like Wooseley, can only find affection in their imaginations.

"We're not restricted just to lovers of animated women anymore, either," added Thorp. "There are a number of men here at CLAW who are more old-fashioned and still love women who appear only in print, or primarily in print if their animated representations have been unsatisfactory. A man who loves Galadriel, the Elven-Queen of Tolkien fame, for instance, has a home with us."

Behind Thorp, another pimply thirty-five year old commented: "Eowyn is way hotter than Galadriel."

"Man," objected Thorp, "Gala has grace, style, warmth, nobility--Eowyn's a honey, but she's a cold fish!"

A third man observed, without looking up from a recent issue of Sirius Comics' Dawn, "Hey, it's moot. Neither of them holds a candle to Luthien Tinuviel." The first two men nodded wistfully and concurred.

Theodore Wooseley is not daunted by his detractors. "I don't care what they say. What we have is special. Nothing's going to change that. I haven't felt this way in years," he added, looking nostalgically at a shelved collection of graphic novels of Richard Corben, whose work inspired the animated film Heavy Metal.

Wooseley added with a smile, "I hear that on the Internet they have pictures of Lara topless!" He looked around nervously. "Now if you'll excuse me, I want to be alone with my... thoughts..."

With that, the love-smitten man returned to the privacy of his home computer.