Posted April 25, I came of age before Tinder hit the scene, using now old-fashioned slow response time desktop dating services. In spite of a few informative relationships of different sorts, I met my partner the old-fashioned way, at a mutual friend's social event. Online dating always felt partly artificial, and transition from that to a "real" relationship sketchy. On social media platforms, especially with professional colleagues where we have a lot of common ground to begin with and might meet "in the real world" at a conference or something , it's more likely to lead to something more enduring.
I was interested in online dating for a lot of different reasons. In the 80's, I was an early adopter of computers and such, and had started social media life hosting a bulletin board, named the Scarlet Fever BB because I set it up when I was home sick.
Connecting required a hardwired modemโthe origin of that iconic sound so popular in movies when machines make that initial screeching handshake with one another. I had a solid Hayes Micromodem what's a "baud", anyway?
Unlike the modem in the movie WarGames, this one was super-advancedโit plugged into the back of a computer, and directly into the phone jack on the wall. Even back then, I interacted with people onlineโeven met a friend from a neighboring town I wouldn't have met otherwise, who was into Black Flag.
From traveling abroad a lot as a child and adolescent, I learned I liked meeting people from all over the place, generally a fun and enriching thing to do. Bulletin boards felt like a kind of traveling, but even then there were some obnoxious characters who, looking back, were kind of "proto-trolls".
