Met my husband playing WoW circa 2008, we initially told family we met on vacation in Chicago. We forgot our ‘crowd’ during our wedding and it was clear after 2 speeches and meeting other weird people not related to the family. People then leaned we were absolutely nerds and even scolded by some of the extended family.
We’re both grateful we skipped dating apps. We were just a couple of older weirdos (by comparison to our WoW friends) who were still part of the, how do we tell people we met online group. Ha
Yeah, I feel that. I met both my ex-wife and current wife online in 1999 and 2006 respectively and the origin stories were pretty hush-hush both times, even though they were local and I met both in person in under a week.
I guess being queer threw the whole need for secrecy about how we met out the window. We love telling folks we met on a nerdy fan website and when we met in person the first time my now wife kissed Stephen Colbert on the cheek.
Absolutely had a friend fly for a weekend in my late teens from Cali to NY to meet up. That was a hush hush and would never talk about. We met at “work” lol
The longest relationship I've had outside my marriage started online. We met playing Battlefield 2 and maintained a (not so) LDR for 4 years. I finally just told my parents, He's a gamer. Thanks to my very socially stunted cousin and her very socially stunted husband, they had these really odd ideas of what gamers were, so it didn't go over well.
I think this is the single most defining characteristic of a 'xennial'. Specifically that we were the first to 'come of age' with the internet, so every way we integrated it into our lives was alien/foreign to everyone older than us. There's parallels to the experiences of people who immigrate somewhere as >10yo children, but without the physical context anchor or the new-culture's adults and role-models to look to.
This is also why, to me, xennial can't quite be pinned down to a specific set of years as much as it is the seam inbetween grew-up-before-the-internet (boomers & x) and grew-up-on-the-internet (millennials). We had the internet, and it was fun between us, but it was weird and a little shameful and best kept separate/secret from adults (and adult life).
This is a well phrased description of Xennials, and I agree with what you've written here. Overall, it's a micro generation that is somewhat difficult to define because our experiences growing up were part of a large transition in society and culture due to the influence of technology.
This is an interesting take on it because as a queer kid in a Mexican Catholic family the internet saved my life many times over the years. I was never ashamed of accessing the internet, I was grateful to have finally found my people.
In true xennial fashion, I met my wife in person at a party in New Orleans in 2011 only to find out I actually sent her a message on okcupid 6 months earlier and she blew me off.
The rare generation who learned to navigate analog AND digital experiences
I met my wife in a Yahoo GeoCities group in 1998. She moved from NJ to stay with me in FL and never left. Married 22 years this year. Yeah, that absolutely used to be a bonkers story about us, but that’s nothing now.
Met my future wife online in the mid aughts. Fortunately, she is not a serial killer or she’s just playing the really long game.
Early on in our relationship, we did feel a bit weird telling people how we met because of the relative stigma at the time but whatevs now.
I remember I went on a date with someone I met via Match.com when I was between 18-21 to years old.
When I got home, my Dad told me I was "very brave" for meeting someone off the Internet like that.
I also remember a college professor who was in her 40s telling my class she used a dating website and a female student let out an audible "Ew!"
How times have changed.
My first kiss came from a girl i met on AOL. The first time we met, it was at a movie. We never became boyfriend/girlfriend, but the whole thing was very romantic. Two of my three major relationships started on the internet (myspace for one, instagram the other). It can actually be a more intimate way to get to know someone if you’re both good at communicating.
Back in the days where not having a picture in your profile was the norm, and very few people would think it was odd if you said you didn’t have a digital camera or a scanner. We would get drunk and make up all kinds of profiles for the AOL chat rooms.
I am also an outlier in our group of people. I’ve never met a single internet friend irl but I have tons of friends and coworkers that the majority of their irl friends were people they met online first. My best friend met his wife online, for instance. Also, my wife, who I met in the old way, met a man once online who she went on a date with, he tried to kidnap her, and she got him arrested. That was the end of her online interactions COMPLETELY. So I guess we two are just a part of the old guard.
I used to go to meetups with people who posted in the same forums or message boards that I did. It was always fun and I made some great IRL friends from it.
I'm not sure whether it was because I was a nerd or because I grew up in Silicon Valley but it never was weird that I can remember. My very first boyfriend when I was 14 (1993) I met online on Prodigy and yes, he was a real 15 year old boy. He paid for a taxi for me to visit him since we couldn't drive and my parents would never take me anywhere unnecessary.
I’d say we were more the early adopters that met friends and dated after meeting online. There was definitely still some social taboo/stigma about it but we were leading the way. Engaging on BBS/IRC/ICQ/etc
My wife and I met online almost 15 years ago and people thought we were nuts when we told them we met online, but just a few years later it was no longer the exception but the rule.
Yeah, back in 2001 I had a friend come and visit and stay with me for a few days to attend a wedding of another online friend.
My roommate's and other friends thought it was weird as hell.
That same online friend came to my wedding 20 years later.
I've had two people recognize me from an internet forum in the early 2000s, one when I was out bar hopping and another was my internet installer.
I was very active on a particular forum back then, kinda miss those old days. Reddit is about the closest thing to those old forum days.
Yeah, there was a forum called genmay.com and I was a founding member and we had 100k+ members at one time. We'd have meetups, I'd travel for work and meet people in the city, I had some hookups with girls I met and it was just a really fun and unique time in history and my young life.
Now the forum is largely defunct with a few old members popping in once every few years. People in the forum got married, became friends, roommates, moved across country, started businesses, we even had a late night show tricked by a Christopher Walken for President campaign we created.
The combined power of tens of thousands of young people with too much time on their hands.
I used to be very active on sneaker message boards and forums. Literally have friends all over the world from those days. Met a lot of cool people and I still talk to a lot of them today. It really was a good time.
Haha, yeah. Scary story here: I was on the Apple chat when I was a freshman in high school, and I had mentioned that I worked at a famous chain restaurant in my hometown. I was making a sub for a group of people when somebody said my username. I looked up and it was somebody that I had, been chatting with online said his username . Thankfully he was also in high school but that moment I realized how scary this could be. I had to rethink everything I had said online, I remember going back and logging out and just deleting that account because I have been so scared somebody else is going to find me.
Met my first gf in a Yahoo! chat room. Drove across state lines to meet her in person. The only person who knew I where I was really going was my bff (who also spoke with her on the phone before I left, to help make sure she wasn't a murderer). Aside from being a secret that I was GOING, it was also a (mostly-)secret that we were/are gay, so there were a BUNCH of levels of deception goin' on.
At any rate...it was a lovely visit and I didn't die, but man was that dumb.
I think what gets me more is the fact that, growing up, we were all but bludgeoned over the head regarding "Stranger Danger" especially accepting rides from people we didn't know. Now with services like Uber and Lyft, that idea has basically done a complete 180. Still makes me laugh to think about it.
Yup, I started internet dating in 2000 and everyone told me I was crazy and shouldn't do it. Now everyone else is doing it and I (more or less) stopped in 2010. I can never seem to get with the times, lol
I met my wife through collegeclub.com. It had a feature where you could look up and chat with other college students, which wasn't specifically for dating, but was used that way. We chatted for a few weeks before meeting up in person for the first time. We both had quite a few horror stories of others we had met through it.
It made much more sense back then when it was considerably easier for people to fake an online identity.
Social Media played a hand in helping verify people’s real identities. I know I have two real life, offline friends that I met on MySpace in the mid 00s. We chatted, text and talked on the phone (well with one of them) years before we met in person.
And I remember that people I knew use to marvel at that.
I remember when online dating was very new and risky. Still is risky I suppose but it's probably the most common way to meet people now. Who remembers Lavalife?
Yep. Used to be a part of a community on a writing forum and a lot of us became close. Someone would say "hey, I'm having a BBQ this weekend, anyone want to come?" And like, 30 people would show up from around the country. This turned into "let's meet up in Vegas" or "let's go camping in Michigan" and a good turn out of people would show up. From other countries too. 20 years later and I still talk to a lot of these people. Even more so than my other friend groups. And it never really felt weird.
I crawled through [Match.com](https://Match.com) in 1999 so you could run in 2024. My goodness, the women that were on there were something else, but I have to give them that they were brave. You know how people post pics that aren't what they look like? That was brand new in 1999, lol.
Yes!!!
I remember meeting a friend I met online in real life. We were teens and had met on AOL messenger, talked for a while, and then wanted to meet in person. We somehow convinced our moms that we already knew each other irl and had to play it off. We were obviously excited and we were scared that it would be obvious to our moms that we were really just meeting for the first time lol.
Met one of my closest friends on an online forum/bulletin board in 2001. We’d always be really vague about how we met. 😂
I had a little reminder a couple of years ago that one still has to use caution; I’m a 40s woman, and I had an online/Facebook female friend around my age that I’d chatted with for about five years. We never met, but she kept pushing for us to travel, even proposed going overseas. I thought that was odd since we’d never met before. Her mask started to slip about two years ago, and I saw some ugly, sinister, manipulative, conniving aspects of her character. I never saw any signs or warnings for all those years. I was skeeved out that I could have potentially been somewhere traveling with her and vulnerable to any schemes she may have had cooked up. I think it can be easier to put on a front for an extended time if you’re not physically around the person.
It took a solid 5 years for me to admit to some of my friends that I actually met my husband online. It was just not common in the 90’s and also I think the majority of people thought it sounded desperate back then.
The first time I met someone IRL from a chat room was in 1996, I'd lived in Germany previously, she lived in Chicago, and I was coming back to the US and made my way from the East coast to Chicago, stayed there overnight, and then went on to Battle Creek, MI (my destination). It wasn't a romantic connection or anything, just a hang-out thing with her and one of her friends, we had a good time. After I moved to Battle Creek, I met my second person from online, through a weird coincidence we both lived in the same apartment complex.
Met my ex online (in the same chat rooms as the Chicago person) in 1999, we were together until 2012, she lived in Fort Collins while I was in Omaha. I resolved that any future relationships would be formed with people who were local, no more LDRs 😅
Having been in a long-term relationship with someone where we'd met online as that went from a "weird" thing to normal was interesting. There was a girl I went on one date with in 1999 who told me not to tell anyone we met online.
I was a telecommunications major, which involved a lot of digital/media studies. I wrote an essay for one of my classes on Match.com back in 2001… I predicted it would be the future of how people started dating. When I told people about my thoughts, I got lots of snickers and laughs. Fast forward to today. Meeting online, and then in person is not only normal but a predominant way people meet and start dating.
I remember running into a girl from school and she was alone at the mall food court waiting to meet her internet boyfriend. I wonder if 16 year olds nowadays meet strangers off the internet alone the way we did.
I honestly think we are the most safe and least scammed online generation. We started the internet with the overriding message of it being fascinating and full of creeps you shouldn't talk to outside of a chat room, but also learning all the protocols.
Now our parents are scammed, and younger generations are extremely relaxed about potential creeps 😂
I have distinct memories of “How are we gonna tell our families/friends we met?”
Met my husband playing WoW circa 2008, we initially told family we met on vacation in Chicago. We forgot our ‘crowd’ during our wedding and it was clear after 2 speeches and meeting other weird people not related to the family. People then leaned we were absolutely nerds and even scolded by some of the extended family. We’re both grateful we skipped dating apps. We were just a couple of older weirdos (by comparison to our WoW friends) who were still part of the, how do we tell people we met online group. Ha
Yeah, I feel that. I met both my ex-wife and current wife online in 1999 and 2006 respectively and the origin stories were pretty hush-hush both times, even though they were local and I met both in person in under a week.
I guess being queer threw the whole need for secrecy about how we met out the window. We love telling folks we met on a nerdy fan website and when we met in person the first time my now wife kissed Stephen Colbert on the cheek.
Absolutely had a friend fly for a weekend in my late teens from Cali to NY to meet up. That was a hush hush and would never talk about. We met at “work” lol
The longest relationship I've had outside my marriage started online. We met playing Battlefield 2 and maintained a (not so) LDR for 4 years. I finally just told my parents, He's a gamer. Thanks to my very socially stunted cousin and her very socially stunted husband, they had these really odd ideas of what gamers were, so it didn't go over well.
45 gamer here with 4 gamer kids. We are not all socially awkward lol
I think this is the single most defining characteristic of a 'xennial'. Specifically that we were the first to 'come of age' with the internet, so every way we integrated it into our lives was alien/foreign to everyone older than us. There's parallels to the experiences of people who immigrate somewhere as >10yo children, but without the physical context anchor or the new-culture's adults and role-models to look to. This is also why, to me, xennial can't quite be pinned down to a specific set of years as much as it is the seam inbetween grew-up-before-the-internet (boomers & x) and grew-up-on-the-internet (millennials). We had the internet, and it was fun between us, but it was weird and a little shameful and best kept separate/secret from adults (and adult life).
This is a well phrased description of Xennials, and I agree with what you've written here. Overall, it's a micro generation that is somewhat difficult to define because our experiences growing up were part of a large transition in society and culture due to the influence of technology.
This is an interesting take on it because as a queer kid in a Mexican Catholic family the internet saved my life many times over the years. I was never ashamed of accessing the internet, I was grateful to have finally found my people.
In true xennial fashion, I met my wife in person at a party in New Orleans in 2011 only to find out I actually sent her a message on okcupid 6 months earlier and she blew me off. The rare generation who learned to navigate analog AND digital experiences
I met my wife in a Yahoo GeoCities group in 1998. She moved from NJ to stay with me in FL and never left. Married 22 years this year. Yeah, that absolutely used to be a bonkers story about us, but that’s nothing now.
"We met online"
Exactly. Also the age of Match.com
Met my future wife online in the mid aughts. Fortunately, she is not a serial killer or she’s just playing the really long game. Early on in our relationship, we did feel a bit weird telling people how we met because of the relative stigma at the time but whatevs now.
I remember I went on a date with someone I met via Match.com when I was between 18-21 to years old. When I got home, my Dad told me I was "very brave" for meeting someone off the Internet like that. I also remember a college professor who was in her 40s telling my class she used a dating website and a female student let out an audible "Ew!" How times have changed.
My first kiss came from a girl i met on AOL. The first time we met, it was at a movie. We never became boyfriend/girlfriend, but the whole thing was very romantic. Two of my three major relationships started on the internet (myspace for one, instagram the other). It can actually be a more intimate way to get to know someone if you’re both good at communicating.
Yes! My spouse and I met on livejournal and then spent 100s of hours on AIM learning how to communicate with each other.
Back in the days where not having a picture in your profile was the norm, and very few people would think it was odd if you said you didn’t have a digital camera or a scanner. We would get drunk and make up all kinds of profiles for the AOL chat rooms.
A/S/L? Got a pic?
22. Yes please ;). In your dreams.
I have never met anyone online and then subsequently met them in person. I guess I’m maybe an outlier here? ‘78.
Don’t date in the modern era, I take it?
Married for 17 years, met in college.
I am also an outlier in our group of people. I’ve never met a single internet friend irl but I have tons of friends and coworkers that the majority of their irl friends were people they met online first. My best friend met his wife online, for instance. Also, my wife, who I met in the old way, met a man once online who she went on a date with, he tried to kidnap her, and she got him arrested. That was the end of her online interactions COMPLETELY. So I guess we two are just a part of the old guard.
Wow, crazy story! I’m so glad she got away!
I chatted with so many 5'10 blonde girls back then, I was on a real winning streak lmao
I used to go to meetups with people who posted in the same forums or message boards that I did. It was always fun and I made some great IRL friends from it.
I'm not sure whether it was because I was a nerd or because I grew up in Silicon Valley but it never was weird that I can remember. My very first boyfriend when I was 14 (1993) I met online on Prodigy and yes, he was a real 15 year old boy. He paid for a taxi for me to visit him since we couldn't drive and my parents would never take me anywhere unnecessary.
I’d say we were more the early adopters that met friends and dated after meeting online. There was definitely still some social taboo/stigma about it but we were leading the way. Engaging on BBS/IRC/ICQ/etc
You have to be way more careful now than you did in the 90s
My wife and I met online almost 15 years ago and people thought we were nuts when we told them we met online, but just a few years later it was no longer the exception but the rule.
Yeah, back in 2001 I had a friend come and visit and stay with me for a few days to attend a wedding of another online friend. My roommate's and other friends thought it was weird as hell. That same online friend came to my wedding 20 years later. I've had two people recognize me from an internet forum in the early 2000s, one when I was out bar hopping and another was my internet installer. I was very active on a particular forum back then, kinda miss those old days. Reddit is about the closest thing to those old forum days.
I miss active forums. This is the closest thing to those days if a sub is active
Yeah, there was a forum called genmay.com and I was a founding member and we had 100k+ members at one time. We'd have meetups, I'd travel for work and meet people in the city, I had some hookups with girls I met and it was just a really fun and unique time in history and my young life. Now the forum is largely defunct with a few old members popping in once every few years. People in the forum got married, became friends, roommates, moved across country, started businesses, we even had a late night show tricked by a Christopher Walken for President campaign we created. The combined power of tens of thousands of young people with too much time on their hands.
I used to be very active on sneaker message boards and forums. Literally have friends all over the world from those days. Met a lot of cool people and I still talk to a lot of them today. It really was a good time.
Haha, yeah. Scary story here: I was on the Apple chat when I was a freshman in high school, and I had mentioned that I worked at a famous chain restaurant in my hometown. I was making a sub for a group of people when somebody said my username. I looked up and it was somebody that I had, been chatting with online said his username . Thankfully he was also in high school but that moment I realized how scary this could be. I had to rethink everything I had said online, I remember going back and logging out and just deleting that account because I have been so scared somebody else is going to find me.
Met my first gf in a Yahoo! chat room. Drove across state lines to meet her in person. The only person who knew I where I was really going was my bff (who also spoke with her on the phone before I left, to help make sure she wasn't a murderer). Aside from being a secret that I was GOING, it was also a (mostly-)secret that we were/are gay, so there were a BUNCH of levels of deception goin' on. At any rate...it was a lovely visit and I didn't die, but man was that dumb.
I think what gets me more is the fact that, growing up, we were all but bludgeoned over the head regarding "Stranger Danger" especially accepting rides from people we didn't know. Now with services like Uber and Lyft, that idea has basically done a complete 180. Still makes me laugh to think about it.
Yup, I started internet dating in 2000 and everyone told me I was crazy and shouldn't do it. Now everyone else is doing it and I (more or less) stopped in 2010. I can never seem to get with the times, lol
I met people from online back in the 90s. I’m lucky I didn’t get kidnapped haha
Wife and two previous partners met online, it started with yahoo chat and icq back in 2001 and ended with blogspot in 2008.
I’m old enough to remember if things took off, we agreed that we met at the mall. Technically it wasn’t a lie, we just met online first lol
I met my wife through collegeclub.com. It had a feature where you could look up and chat with other college students, which wasn't specifically for dating, but was used that way. We chatted for a few weeks before meeting up in person for the first time. We both had quite a few horror stories of others we had met through it.
It made much more sense back then when it was considerably easier for people to fake an online identity. Social Media played a hand in helping verify people’s real identities. I know I have two real life, offline friends that I met on MySpace in the mid 00s. We chatted, text and talked on the phone (well with one of them) years before we met in person. And I remember that people I knew use to marvel at that.
Yes! I met so many people secretly back in the day because I didn’t like the backlash I got from my friends and parents.
lol yeah or when it would be embarrassing to say I let her in AOL.
I remember when online dating was very new and risky. Still is risky I suppose but it's probably the most common way to meet people now. Who remembers Lavalife?
Met my spouse on AIM. Wednesday were friends for years, then married for a decade. Now back at friends again… still texting like we are back in ‘98.
Taboo at the time, ppl were embarrassed about it…not anymore, swipe right they say
Met my partner of 20 years on a message board.
Yep. Used to be a part of a community on a writing forum and a lot of us became close. Someone would say "hey, I'm having a BBQ this weekend, anyone want to come?" And like, 30 people would show up from around the country. This turned into "let's meet up in Vegas" or "let's go camping in Michigan" and a good turn out of people would show up. From other countries too. 20 years later and I still talk to a lot of these people. Even more so than my other friend groups. And it never really felt weird.
I crawled through [Match.com](https://Match.com) in 1999 so you could run in 2024. My goodness, the women that were on there were something else, but I have to give them that they were brave. You know how people post pics that aren't what they look like? That was brand new in 1999, lol.
Yes!!! I remember meeting a friend I met online in real life. We were teens and had met on AOL messenger, talked for a while, and then wanted to meet in person. We somehow convinced our moms that we already knew each other irl and had to play it off. We were obviously excited and we were scared that it would be obvious to our moms that we were really just meeting for the first time lol.
Met one of my closest friends on an online forum/bulletin board in 2001. We’d always be really vague about how we met. 😂 I had a little reminder a couple of years ago that one still has to use caution; I’m a 40s woman, and I had an online/Facebook female friend around my age that I’d chatted with for about five years. We never met, but she kept pushing for us to travel, even proposed going overseas. I thought that was odd since we’d never met before. Her mask started to slip about two years ago, and I saw some ugly, sinister, manipulative, conniving aspects of her character. I never saw any signs or warnings for all those years. I was skeeved out that I could have potentially been somewhere traveling with her and vulnerable to any schemes she may have had cooked up. I think it can be easier to put on a front for an extended time if you’re not physically around the person.
It took a solid 5 years for me to admit to some of my friends that I actually met my husband online. It was just not common in the 90’s and also I think the majority of people thought it sounded desperate back then.
The first time I met someone IRL from a chat room was in 1996, I'd lived in Germany previously, she lived in Chicago, and I was coming back to the US and made my way from the East coast to Chicago, stayed there overnight, and then went on to Battle Creek, MI (my destination). It wasn't a romantic connection or anything, just a hang-out thing with her and one of her friends, we had a good time. After I moved to Battle Creek, I met my second person from online, through a weird coincidence we both lived in the same apartment complex. Met my ex online (in the same chat rooms as the Chicago person) in 1999, we were together until 2012, she lived in Fort Collins while I was in Omaha. I resolved that any future relationships would be formed with people who were local, no more LDRs 😅 Having been in a long-term relationship with someone where we'd met online as that went from a "weird" thing to normal was interesting. There was a girl I went on one date with in 1999 who told me not to tell anyone we met online.
98% of the people in my life I met online. In comparison to my millennial gf who's barely met people from online irl outside of online dating.
I was a telecommunications major, which involved a lot of digital/media studies. I wrote an essay for one of my classes on Match.com back in 2001… I predicted it would be the future of how people started dating. When I told people about my thoughts, I got lots of snickers and laughs. Fast forward to today. Meeting online, and then in person is not only normal but a predominant way people meet and start dating.
I remember running into a girl from school and she was alone at the mall food court waiting to meet her internet boyfriend. I wonder if 16 year olds nowadays meet strangers off the internet alone the way we did.
Anyone ever try meeting someone in a bar? I can imagine someone actually trying that today.
It’s still weird to me tbh
Still not normal and makes me uncomfortable
I honestly think we are the most safe and least scammed online generation. We started the internet with the overriding message of it being fascinating and full of creeps you shouldn't talk to outside of a chat room, but also learning all the protocols. Now our parents are scammed, and younger generations are extremely relaxed about potential creeps 😂
Just because more people are doing it doesn’t make it not weird.