I said I’d write about romance, how I met your father, etc. So here goes. 

I met Tim on MySpace. It was this time of the year in 2006 and I had been home from Thailand for six months. If you had asked me a year before, how long I was going to live overseas, I would have answered, “Indefinitely.” Circumstances changed, and then I was back in the USA by the end of spring. I turned thirty over the summer. 

I had not dated anyone for longer than three months before it fell apart. Either they liked me more, or I liked them more, but it had not worked out for me and another person to both like each other a similar amount. Many of my friends had gotten married or moved away or both. Dating was turning out to be harder than it looked. Zero stars.

My older brother and I had been chatting regularly since my return. He was living in California and I was in Oregon and through a series of telephone conversations we shared how we had both independently come to the conclusion that it was “time to grow up and get married.” He was rapidly approaching forty. I think our Dad dying a couple of years before shook us both up too. Loosing someone in the inner circle, kind of makes you want to get some studier backups. It was time for us to build families of our own. 

We had both dabbled in the online world of dating with mixed results. There was an online company called eHarmony that was kind of expensive, but boasted of better results and there was a discount for a six-month subscription. We both signed up and promised to share our experiences and encourage each other from afar. 

At first it went pretty poorly. It doesn’t matter how scientific everything is when the people filling out their profiles are lying. I kept getting matched up with guys exaggerating about their height and then being offended when I was taller than them in real life. Catfishing wasn’t a thing yet, but there were definitely liberties being taken. Online, people could become anyone they wanted. Meanwhile, my brother informed me that were “no good women” in his hometown. He was living in Los Angeles, so surely there was at least one decent person out of eight million people, I replied. 

In between sorting through my matches, and dutifully filling out lists of “must haves” and “can’t stands,” I was maintaining a second, non-romantic profile on MySpace, the wild and wacky predecessor to Facebook. At the height of it’s popularity, MySpace boasted 100 million subscribers. I had been encouraged to join by my students, and I would post photos and little bits of writing. Anyone could talk to anyone, and one day I got a message from a guy from Pennsylvania. He wrote in complete sentences and for an English instructor it was to quote the then ubiquitous Paris Hilton, “Hot.” 

So while my official dating profile stagnated, I was online messaging Tim every day. I hadn’t heard from my brother in a while either because he had met someone named Nancy. Emails gave way to phone calls and after a few months, we planned a visit. Tim’s visit was actually a cross-country move, because why not just move to Oregon? The next summer we roadtripped to California to my brother’s wedding in LA, and the next year to the baby shower. The year after that, he and Nancy and our nephew traveled North to attend our wedding. 

My dating advice is probably the same as anything else, don’t give up and be your best self. It probably doesn’t hurt to get a running buddy so you can encourage each other and share. Go all in, because we only have so much time, so we have to make it count.