Several readers take the thread on subculture dating in a different direction:
The Internet creates efficiencies in the market for everything, people looking for dates included. I stuck with online dating for a long time because my experiences with offline dating were no better. After 75-plus online dates and several relationships with women I met online, I finally met my wife – and it was her first online date. We’ve now been married for nearly a year and have a 7-week-old baby.
Another:
My husband and I met on Match.com in late 2001 and discovered within two rounds of emails that we had attended the same church in the early ’80s and undoubtedly met. We married our exes in that church the same year. We knew several people in common, including his former boss, who confirmed to me his employment and good character. Our connections went back to the 1950s when a member of his extended family knew my parents. My husband grew up in a Boston suburb where his mother bought his first pair of hard-soled shoes. More than 30 years later I lived in that same suburb and bought my son’s first pair of hard-soled shoes in the same store. My husband, who is white, recalls having a crush on a Black woman in the choir, who we established was me. I did not see white men as potential romantic partners and have no recollection of the man to whom I’m now married.
Both of our marriages had ended and eventually each of us decided to look for companionship online. I was looking for about a year, met seven intelligent, attractive men in person without establishing a significant bond with any of them, so I decided to take down my profile in one week. My husband joined the site two days after my decision. Less than an hour after he posted his profile, I saw it and got in touch – having decided to include white men in my dating search. Before meeting in person we had numerous phone conversations and suspected we might get married one day. The moment we laid eyes on each other – three weeks after meeting online – we knew we’d spend the rest of our lives together. We lived in separate cities. I moved with my son seven months after the online meeting. It is very fortunate that I had lived in that same city for years and was delighted to move back. We married one year after our initial online encounter.
My husband and I are atheists – more evidence of our compatibility – and don’t ascribe to the idea that we were “meant to be together”, implying that a supernatural force controls human experiences. But serendipitous things happen and some transcend rational explanation. I see it as life-altering good luck.
A male reader:
I’m very excited to be writing to you as a brand new (five minutes ago) Dish subscriber! I have to weigh in on the serendipity thread. My husband and I met in an AOL chat room.
We were both looking for “the one” and had been single long enough, and had dated enough, to have developed fairly keen selection and rejection abilities. We lived about 90 minutes from each other in NJ at the time, had exhausted our respective local dating pools, and had recently expanded into more GU (geographically undesirable) potential mates.
Our first date was to the NY Auto Show at the Javits Center (how’s that for breaking stereotypes?). Feeling the electricity crackling between us, neither of us could focus on the show, so we left after about an hour, heading to Greenwich Village to find something more intimate to do. Despite having worked in Lower Manhattan for nearly 10 years, and knowing it like the back of my hand, I was so distracted driving down the West Side Highway, I suddenly realized we were at Battery Park, having driven right past the Village.
We went to see a movie we had heard about: It’s My Party about a man dying of AIDS (great first date stuff, huh?!). We held hands and cried together. After the movie, we found a romantic little restaurant, held hands on the candlelit table and stared into each others eyes throughout the meal. We were utterly oblivious to our surroundings, each other’s faces cameoed in focus with everything else around us a blur.
Despite the late hour, we simply could not bear to part and decided to drive the 90 minutes to my house, even though my date had to be home early the next morning for a family function. We made love the rest of the night (okay… we don’t break every gay sterotype. Guys can indeed be guys). As I drove him home, bleary-eyed the next morning, I said “I love you” while still on our first date, which by then had run 22 hours. The only reason he didn’t respond in kind until that evening was because he didn’t want to say “Me too!”
He moved in with me less than two months later. We bought a home together and merged our finances after 9 months. That was over 17 years ago. We’ve spent the past 10-plus years full-time RVing around North America, living and working together, side-by-side 24/7, in about 400 square feet. When people openly wonder how we can live and work together in such a small space without killing each other, it makes us realize that we must have about the best relationship in the world.
If that isn’t serendipity, I don’t know what is.
Another reader’s story:
Serendipity is a weird and fickle mistress. After I finished my grad degree in the UK, I returned to the states and, due to the economic downturn, was only able to find temp work. My first day, I found a girl who was absolutely perfect – a certain type of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She had been in the UK exactly when I had. She and I shared a love of the same music (the Smiths chief among them), We enjoyed walks in the forest, smoking pot over drinking, and debating politics. It was, to a large extent, love at first sight, and it seemed like this was just exactly the kind of conventional meeting that would lead to the ultimate relationship.
At the same time, I’d been maintaining a profile on the free dating site OKCupid. I’d had some success getting laid from the site, and I’d had a few three- to four-month-long relationships from it, but nothing had ever been lasting. While I was (non-exclusively) seeing the woman described above, I met another woman who didn’t have much in common with me. I mean, we both liked music, but she was definitely not my “type.” However, as our relationship progressed over a period of a few months, it became clear that whatever we lacked “in common,” we got along brilliantly. I mean, it was uncanny how much we just liked each other.
To many, the first woman would seem like the best match. We hadn’t “had” to meet online; we’d met through far more conventional means. However, that relationship went up in flames; it was an awful match. We ended up loathing each other because our personalities, for whatever reason, didn’t mesh.
However, the second woman and I continued to see each other. And continued. And four weeks ago tonight, we were married, after four years of dating. I have never met someone that I simply clicked with so well – and someone who was willing to put up with my rather massive amounts of shit.
As I said, serendipity is a weird and fickle mistress. Had I listened to serendipity, I would have been broken by the fact that the first woman and I had not worked out. But thanks to online dating, I found someone who matched me perfectly – we don’t have everything in common, but we click. THAT is what love is all about: you find someone who makes you feel good and who you can make feel good. Far more important than the “old school” ideas of how one is supposed to meet his or her mate. I got married thanks to online dating. And I couldn’t be prouder of that.
The Dish 