The Blog before the Blog

Once upon a time, online dating wasn’t the norm. It came after the world got comfortable with the internet. It was a time when how the world interacted with the internet was rapidly changing, a time when it was connecting people in ways we never anticipated it would. It was chaotic and messy. And that’s when someone had the brilliant idea to launch internet dating.

I was there. I have a witness.

Around 2010, I gained one of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. We don’t speak anymore, because friendships end, sometimes for good reasons — sometimes not. (But that’s a story for another post.) She was single. She was dating. Online dating had just become a thing, no one boasted they’d met their partner online, no one talked about their dating profile around the water cooler. The apps were rough. The profiles were messy. And the men?

My best friend had a gift for attracting the most spectacularly unhinged first-date experiences I have ever heard of in my life. We’re talking catfishing before anyone called it catfishing. Lies so specific and unnecessary you had to admire the commitment. I’m talking — riding shotgun while they ran from HIS WIFE. The wife who called. Mid-date. You cannot make this shit up.

So naturally, we decided — this would be an epic blog.

The vision: a hilarious, unhinged roast of the men my bestie encountered. One post for every date. At least one post a week. How big could we grow it? We had plans.

In our defense — and I say this as someone who was also in the thick of it — we were both raising small children, building careers, surviving on Dr. Pepper and Marlboro Lights, and doing that very specific kind of tired that lives in your bones and doesn’t respond to sleep. The blog was a great idea that met the immovable object of our actual lives, and our actual lives won.

Strangers. Women who found us somehow, in those early weird days of the internet when nothing was really algorithmic yet and you mostly just stumbled into things. They came and they stayed and they did something we had never anticipated: they started talking. They left comments. They told their own stories. They linked their friends. A space we had barely even built — they filled it. Because only women understand that absolute ridiculousness that is — men.

What does it say that the moment someone held up a microphone and said tell me your worst date — women lined up? I think it says something true about how much we carry quietly. How many stories get told only in kitchens, over wine, to the one friend who will absolutely not judge you? How few spaces existed then, and exist now, where a woman can say this was absurd and embarrassing and kind of awful and also genuinely hilarious and have a room full of people nod and say “Gurl — same.”

It didn’t become what we anticipated. Life got in the way — as it tends to.

But I’ve been thinking about those women. I’ve been thinking about how online dating has only gotten more unhinged since 2010, that almost no one is dating without at least one online profile now, and the stories are still out there — being told in kitchens, over wine, to that one trusted friend.

So, here I am. Creating another blog. The theme is different (more centered on my life, thoughts, writing, and so on) but my heart — to create a place where people can feel seen — the same.

Here’s your open door. If you have a story — a date that went sideways, a profile that defied explanation, a moment that was so bad it became something you tell at dinner parties — I want it. Share it in the comments below or send it to me through the contact button at the top of the screen, and I’ll keep your name as private as you want it.