In the spring of 1996, I was bored and searching the AOL Member Directory. Pretty vague stuff. Tennessee, 1980 birthdate. So I IM'd a few dozen people. I explained what I was doing, asked what part of Tennessee they were from, asked what month they were born in, yadda yadda. One girl said she was born in January. Hey, me too! What day? The 28th. Groovy, me too! Anyway, all the other conversations eventually fizzled out, but I kept talking to this girl.
Eventually we exchanged pictures, I didn't think Maryam was very cute in that picture. Apparently the picture I sent her was of myself looking at a polaroid... she said she wondered at that point if the guy in the polaroid was the real picture of me... and so basically ignored the picture. In any event, there wasn't any sort of physical attraction, nor any particular desire to meet.
Two years later we were still talking. Still no physical interest. Still no interest in meeting. The girl I was dating at the time (that was an odd one. We met at school. Began dating, and then it seemed like the relationship shifted to being online.) also chatted with Maryam. Eventually she and Maryam met. And then she dragged me the hour drive to meet her. And then she broke up with me. Maryam also ended up single around that time.
Well. Couple of single kids, two year friendship, recently found out that their both kinda nice to look at... we ended up dating a month or two later. Then waxed and waned through an off-and-on relationship for the next 6 years (about two years on, three years of off-and-on, and then one year back on). Finally got married in 2004.
Maryam is definitely the most attractive girl I've ever met online, but she wasn't the only one. For a while there was a whole group of people that met at a local coffee house in Knoxville and also hung out in an IRC channel. So I met a bunch of folks there, though the chatroom drama come to life was a little too surreal for me to take anyone seriously. Random people met off messageboards, and IM networks... nothing major.
The only other cross-over was Airalin. She lived in California a few hours away from my Dad. So a few times when I'd fly out to spend some time with him, we'd meet up and go skiing. And make out like teenagers. Which was odd since our average age at the time was 23. I think she was into me a bit more than I was into her... especially since I had the Maryam thing in the background. The online and offline features of that relationship didn't overlap very much. We didn't talk about things to do when we were going to meet... and if we did talk about meeting, it was mostly times and places and other technical details. Once that was hammered out, we'd go back to talking about anime or mythology or whatever. Airalin was also pretty hot, but very far away. We'll still get back in touch about once a year to see what's happening.
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So of course I went to hunt down Airalin after posting this. And I found
BetaGirl. Crazy. I've been able to find out more about how that was produced than I've been able to turn up about her current online presence. I found some
other interesting stuff, though. I'm beginning to wonder if the reason I can't track her down is because she's been locked away or buried.