If you’ve been around long enough, cast your mind back to 2003. A time before YouTube existed or smartphones. All people had back then was a phone that could send texts and online dating was probably viewed as a ‘little bit weird’. This was a time when things like AOL messenger and ICQ were popular. When people signed on you’d hear a noise and just like pavlov’s dog, your synapses were trained for those sounds. Now you can go on apps and swipe away to your hearts content if the mood takes you and there’s no shortage of low-attention-span choices.
But this wasn’t 2025. It was 2003… and I was online. A company called Lycos had pumped a big wadge of boodle into it’s online dating site which it called Love @ Lycos. It was a place where people could basically flirt online and possibly even meet. They ran an advertising campaign on TV and out of curiosity I created an account, but never really took it seriously.
When I created my account I didn’t even include a photo of myself. I was playing around with some Flash animation so I put that in there but I think it just uploaded a static image saying something corny like “Sexy Girls Apply Within”. Cringeworthy stuff, truth being told. You have to remember though, this was an era where the masses hadn’t really fully got on the internet yet, it was still sort of niche. Well, it was in my eyes anyway.
I remember thinking to myself that the interface wasn’t bad and the account was free, so that was good. You didn’t know who was real or fake, so you had to take it all with a pinch of salt, but I spoke to a few people on there. I didn’t assume any of the photos were actually of the people in the profile, but that didn’t stop me from browsing at the time.
I was in between jobs with some time on my hands. It was a bit of a filler in between looking for jobs and watching Bewitched repeats on TV. One day, as I was browsing through the profiles, I stumbled across a photo of a woman I liked the look of, so I messaged her. It was a coin flip whether that was actually the person in the photo, but that’s all you had to go on back then. There was no cross-referencing on Facebook or video calling way back in 2003.
With these sort of sites, it’s a bit of a lottery who does and doesn’t reply anyway and I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I got a reply. Messages were exchanged back and forth and I remember in the photo she had an iron in the background which made the photo seem more plausible. After a bit, she gave me her AOL messenger username and even though I wasn’t on AOL, I had it too. It seems quite bizarre looking back at that now, but messengers back in those days were pretty cool things and a lot like WhatsApp except it was on your computer and not on your phone (deep down I wish that was still the case, as I hate that goddamned app lol).
We talked a lot over the next week or so. When you talk to someone new and find you get on, even on something like messenger, it sort of overtakes your thinking when you’re younger. I recall she wanted to meet up at the end of the week but I couldn’t make it on the day she said, so we didn’t do it until the week after. She seemed disappointed at the time, and I distinctly remember her saying, “I’ll have to put my new floaty top away then”. That’s what she did have to do as I still couldn’t meet her that week anyway :).
The thing with online dating is you never tend to live right next door to each other. I lived in Birmingham and she lived in Dudley. I remember her assuring me she didn’t have a Dudley accent. I thought to myself, “If she doesn’t have a Dudley accent, what accent does she have then?”. Where she actually came from in Dudley I’d never heard of before and for privacy reasons I won’t write it here either.
Anyway, we sort of met halfway in Birmingham at a pub. I got there early and waited around for her. She sent me a text saying, “I’m getting a lift so don’t judge me when I turn up in a poo car”. I didn’t see the car, so I never reached the point where I could turn into Simon Cowell and pass judgement. I wouldn’t have given a toss if she’d turned up in a tuk tuk… as long as she actually turned up.
And turn up she did! We’d talked so much on messenger the prior couple of weeks or so it seemed almost surreal to actually meet her as you already know so much. I remember her telling me she liked Toni Braxton. She was into her animals and she had a pair of Chinchillas as well as a dog and a horse. I never met the horse but by god I met the dog… more on that later.
So there we were in this pub/nightclub place. I thought the way it would play out is we’d chat, have a few drinks and then if we got on, meet up again. Now as I said before, she lived in Dudley and didn’t want to go home on her own in a taxi, so I went with her back to hers and we ended up just talking and half falling asleep in each others arms. It was sweet and I was already quite smitten with her.
We carried on chatting in between and I met up with her again. Back then there were no such things as Sat Navs, I didn’t know that area and map reading wasn’t one of my strengths so to save all the hassle I just got a taxi over there. I did this a few times and I had some pretty interesting conversations with various taxi drivers as it used to take the best part of 45 minutes to get there. One time I was with a taxi driver that got lost and by the time we’d arrived it had taken nearly 1.5 hours to arrive. We ended up asking some old granny at a bus stop where a certain road was and I thought to myself, “This guy is an amateur. I’m paying money for this”. To make matters worse when we finally arrived, he charged me £35 (he called this a discount ha ha) which was a boat load of cash back in 2003, especially as I was in between jobs at the time.
The guy who got lost talked the whole way about self defence moves he’d learned, so he got his £35. Another wannabe high roller raconteur who told me about his gambling holidays in Las Vegas.
Arriving in Dudley for the first time, was a bit like when Nicholas Lyndhurst went through a doorway in Goodnight Sweetheart and ended up somewhere familiar that you wanted to be, but still undeniably different.
During my time there, I learned various ‘Dudleyisms’ including sayings like, “They don’t grow potatoes like that ’round ‘ere”. She got me to say this in my Brummie accent which I think she found rather amusing at the time. I think they also said things like “Bostin'” and I seem to remember a pub called “The Bostin’ Fittle” or something similar. She called Merry Hill, ‘Merry Hell’ and referred to where she lived as ‘the back end of beyond’.
What people will do for love eh. Anyway, she was so lovely to me and we got on so well, all I thought about for the next couple of months or so was her. As Frank Sinatra would say, she got under my skin. She had an Alsatian, I think it’s name was Zak (or it could have been Zach, I’m a bit hazy on that detail). As soon as I used to put my foot on the first part of the path on the lead up to her house, he would know instantly and had a tremendous bark which would have made any god fearing citizen run in the opposite direction. Sometimes I’d amuse myself by counting how many steps I could make before he barked and I don’t think I ever made it past 3.
The first time I ever met Zak, she said, “I’ve just got to get him used to you”. This made me think, “What happens if he doesn’t get used to me? Let’s hope she can deliver on this reassurance”. Zak was the man. Well, actually he wasn’t – he was the dog and I’d joined the pack without telling him first. I remember one night when I got up in the morning and went downstairs, Zak had jumped over the gate into the kitchen and hidden my shoes. I like to think that this was Zak getting used to me and having a little bit of fun at my expense.
The older I get, the more I like dogs and once he’d hidden my shoes without eating them, it made me chuckle. As Samuel L. Jackson said in Pulp Fiction, “Personality goes a long way”.
The good news is during this time I got a job. I had to really as there was no way I could carry on seeing this woman and still go out without having any income coming in. I didn’t enjoy the job, but I enjoyed her company, so that made the job seem a bit better, even if it was just a means to an end. When I used to get into work in the mornings, almost without fail I’d get an email off her by the time I’d logged in. I got used to these nice messages and they set the day off on a good tone.
Working at a desk sounds good in theory but I would have been happier chopping trees down with an axe and eating big sandwiches with down to earth people and the radio on in the background. Somehow I’d got myself typecast into tech support at Jaguar, answering tech calls all day. I’m not really a big phone person, so calls dropping in endlessly reminds me of what a bloke once said in Wife Swap. “You’ve been sent by the devil to give me a preview of hell”. Really, what I wanted to do was become an entrepreneur but at that stage I hadn’t figured out how to fit the pieces of that particular jigsaw puzzle together, but I knew leverage was ultimately the solution.
Whenever I’d explain to someone what I wanted to do, I’d have this inclination to want to explain it visually. I think that’s how I best understand things, so I get my pen out and start drawing things out like some mad professor who has just consumed too much absinthe. I have since realised most people find entrepreneurial ambition a bit droll. Nobody really wants to hear about work after they’ve finished it for the day, but for me, I knew life held something else in store… and it wasn’t being shackled to a desk being told what to do by some employer I could run rings around if I could just find the right opportunity.
When you have purpose, nothing is too much of a bother and at that time in my life she was my purpose. It seems a bit crazy to say that now, because I balance that out now with the goals I focus on and nothing would get in the way of my mission because that’s what keeps me grounded. Not dames, not friends or anything else which could derail that focus. As you get older, you become more protective of your time and where you spend your energy.
I think it’s dangerous to put all your eggs into one basket, but that was all I really cared about at the time. Whenever you feel strongly about someone most other things pale into insignificance, especially at the beginning. I think evolution makes sure that remains the case and it’s something bigger than us.
I carried on seeing her and I even memorised the 30 mile route to her house in my car, without a sat nav. If you know me, that’s a major accomplishment and I was proud I could get there without ending up in Edinburgh or something. With regards to her, she was very interesting, attractive and smart. She also had a sharp sense of humour, which was on my wavelength and I found her decidedly stimulating. This is somewhat unusual for me as I often find people quite boring. I always looked forward to seeing her and at the time I remember thinking how lucky I was (a mayfly only lives a few days, so in retrospect the caveat with luck is over what timeframe you apply the notion of it).
Fast forward a few months I was out with her one night and she had her handbag with her, which she put down on a chair. After what I’m going to refer to as ‘handbag-gate’, she said she was going to lapdance for me. Prior to this revelation, I was blissfully unaware of what was about to take place and I didn’t have DeLorean to hand to travel into the future.
After a few drinks my attention had turned to protecting her handbag when she walked away from it, which is such a ridiculous thing to recall as I’m typing this, but the fact of the matter remains. I don’t know why I gave a shit about a handbag at the time, but there it is. I don’t like the idea of people nicking things out of handbags or anything like that in pubs, so my handbag protecting superpower kicked in.
What was an innocent misunderstanding from my point-of-view, didn’t go down well at the time and somehow it seemed to trigger an argument of sorts in the taxi on the way back.
We were probably drunkenly talking about handbag and lap dances. Anyway, I remember somehow agreeing that alcohol was to blame, when it very much wasn’t, so the next time I met her I felt like I had to moderate my alcohol intake, which was ridiculous when I look back on it now. All I can say is that if you have a vulnerable handbag and no-one else can help, I’m your man. ha ha.
“Well, the story goes, I became tee-total following some confusion involving a handbag and the promise of a lap dance. It’s hard to explain.”
It was all water under a silly bridge as far as I was concerned. The next time I saw her, we didn’t have what I would class as a bad night, not that I was keeping score or anything. Business as usual… or so I thought until the weekend rolled around and she told me she wouldn’t be meeting me that week and was going into town with one of her friends. Nothing abnormal about that, but we’d seen each other every Saturday up until that point so I instinctively knew something was off. Indeed that proved to be the case and the gut is rarely ever wrong.
An impulsive (some may say emotive) decision transpired and I drove over there to speak to her, which was a decidedly bad idea as I drove 30 miles both ways for nothing. When I got there, she wasn’t at home; it turned out she was having tea at her parents house down the road. Piss poor planning meant I hadn’t really considered that she might not be in that evening. I asked her to just come out and speak to me for a few minutes, but she wouldn’t, which was a bit frustrating. This was someone that had previously pranced around like a cat on hot bricks waiting for me to arrive when I was on my way, but my impromptu appearance was now viewed as an inconvenience so severe she wouldn’t grace me with her presence #BadTimes. I shouldn’t have gone – people hate surprises, especially when they don’t want to see you anyway, so that was a lesson learned.
I tried calling her on the landline, but these were the days of dial up modems and she’d already dialled up. Why I didn’t call her on the mobile, I don’t know, but I did eventually get through. She was probably annoyed at me for calling at all, but I remember her saying, “This is new for us”, referring to us actually talking on the phone and I interpreted her tone as seeming annoyed with my persistence or just me in general. You can’t read someone’s body language on the phone, so you’re flying blind.
I wasn’t a big phone person, that much is true and to this day I still prefer to see someone face to face or message them. I think a lot of people are like this as peeps seem to spend more time tapping away on WhatsApp or FB than talking don’t they? I’m actually pretty good on the phone once I’m warmed up, but after years of working in support I preferred to be left alone with my thoughts than two-way chatting and I’m pretty protective about my time. Maybe I had a kind of phone PTSD from answering 50+ calls a day or something (ha ha).
Writing is different. You can sit there and furrow your brow, ponder and do it all at your own leisure. There’s something nice about that, it allows you to say exactly what you want to say without being rushed. I digress…
I got invited over the following week for closure, like a lamb to the slaughter, but you know what.. I wasn’t capitulating at that point. I don’t quit on anything easily and failure is rarely an option, so I just naively went there to make things right. Yep, I was still looking forward to seeing her despite the odds. I did something I would never do now and I took her flowers like some sort of sucker. She opened the door to me and everything seemed quite normal at first.
We drank some wine, chatted, then the conversation turned when she had to do the awkward thing and terminate me in the same way Arnold Schwarzenegger does when he’s wearing sunglasses, looking for Sarah Connor. I didn’t realise it at the time but she was about to put the nails firmly into the coffin. I tried to reason with her, to salvage our relationship which I thought was very much worth saving, but she’d already made her mind up. The only person that didn’t realise this was me.
All manner of thoughts raced through my mind…
“How could she end things with me when we get on so well. How could she end things with me when I love her. How could she end things with me and be without me. What in the actual fuck?”… are the sort of things that go around in your head when you’re being unceremoniously dumped as anybody in that situation will attest.
It’s a story as old as history itself and the finality of it is a tough gig.
I went to sit on the sofa next to her because I just wanted to be closer. I has been sitting on the sofa at the other end of the room, like I’d arrived for some kind of job interview with no vacancies. When I went to sit down on the same sofa, she screamed at me in a high pitch, as if I had done something terrible. I returned back to the interview position on the opposite sofa. She was clearly uncomfortable with ending things with me and I was a bit slow on the uptake.
But here’s the thing, from my perspective it was all out of the blue. There were no big warning signs or weeks of disagreements. I’m sure it wasn’t an overnight thing with her and she’d been building up to this, but for me it was like flipping a light switch on our relationship. I went from being Mr. Perfect to Mr. Yesterdays News in the blink of an eye. I reluctantly left her house and as I drove off I saw her clutching the flowers I’d brought around. Somehow it just didn’t seem right and was one of the saddest days of my life up until that point. I turned up for the big poker game and had to fold before I’d even got started.
I did not take this rejection well, it was fair to say. Everything felt pretty pointless to me after that. Rational thinking did not apply. I did not pass go and I definitely did not collect £200.
People say things they don’t mean when they split with someone. The one at the receiving end just feels rejected and the other person usually feels a mixture of emotions ranging from guilt to elation. I always think it’s easier if you’re the one that cut ties.
I didn’t stop communicating, because I still hadn’t thrown the towel in. Maybe you become deluded in those situations to an extent, because you want something the other person no longer does, irrespective of the reason. If you think you love someone, you’re already all-in and you never had a contingency plan. Nobody ever does.
By email she did tell me shortly afterwards that she “wasn’t all that and a bag of chips“, which is another example of the humour again even though I’m sure she never wrote it with a smile, it still made me laugh as I simultaneously died inside a little more. It’s one of those sayings that I felt like I’d heard before but never used. I’m sure it wasn’t supposed to invite a reply either, but the way my mind works I’m tempted to say things like, “Yes, but would you compare yourself to a lovely pickled egg?“. Are pickled eggs lovely? I don’t know, I’ve never tried one now I come to think of it, but I guess it comes down to how good the person is that does the pickling. Whatever the scenario, I wasn’t in the habit of comparing love interests with food that commonly accompanies battered haddock.
After this, looking back on it now, I slipped into a kind of depression. I absolutely hated my job by this point, which seemed more mundane than ever and kept thinking she would realise it was all a big mistake, sort things out with me and that we’d live happily ever after. This never happened of course and I don’t know if she met someone else shortly after, but at that moment in time I remember being quite lost.
Lost in the same way Reginald Perrin was when he took off all his clothes and just kept walking out into the sea until the waves consumed him to relieve him of the burden.
When you feel that way, it’s very similar to grieving, with the only difference being that the other person is still alive and very much getting on with their version of life. The person you want to speak to about how you are feeling is the one that doesn’t want to know you anymore. That is hard to take and the worst thing is I didn’t really have any closure I could hang my hat on as I never knew what, if anything I did so badly wrong that I deserved the relationship guillotine.
Loss is something that the majority of us experience at certain points in our lives, that goes without saying; I’m nothing special as far as that’s concerned and none of us gets out of here alive. When relationships end, people around you say things like, “I’m sorry to hear it” and at first they’ll listen to you, but after a few days they don’t want to hear it anymore and if you continue talking about it they begin to avoid you like a bad habit. “Oh no, not this again”, they think as they see you appear, anticipating what’s coming next. Without feelings attached to something, there is no empathy from others and the cold, hard truth of it is that with things like this you are very much on your own and you have to come to terms with it in your own way and at your own pace. Every case is different and there are no fixed rules on how long you should feel about something.
Sometimes it never goes away and that’s just the way it is.
Everyone has to face this with relationships that run their course… and death. It’s nothing new.
Personally, I got lost in my own thoughts. I wallowed in them in the same way someone does when they spend too much time in a swimming pool without any sun lotion on. All you’re doing is getting more burnt, but you don’t realise that until you get out.
I went around in a complete daze. One day my aunt called around; I made her tea and gave her biscuits. I did all the hospitable things a person does when a family member visits, except one thing. She was talking to me about something and to be honest with you I was probably just nodding in the right places because my mind had gone sub-aqua. I was mentally underwater, trying to solve a fucking Rubik’s Cube that couldn’t be solved.
After a while my aunt said, “Dean, you haven’t been listening to anything I’ve been talking to you about, have you?” to which I replied something like, “Of course I have“. In response to this she then said, “Go on then, tell me what I have been saying“. I then realised at this point all I could recall hearing was something about a boot of a car and someone wearing a fluorescent jacket, which was never going to pass muster. Regardless, I still said that pitifully scant bit of info that had made it through my eardrums and hoped that was enough to pass the listening test. It wasn’t – my aunt then promptly left because I was effectively in a trance. On balance, I can’t say I blame her.
I spent some time trying to piece together where it went wrong and in the end I concluded I hadn’t got a fucking scooby. None of it made any sense whatsoever. It would be better in these situations if you just had to do a test and if you got below a certain score they said, “Sorry you got 78 out of a 100 and the minimum pass rate is 80, so off you fuck”. That would be much easier to come to terms with – something measurable.
Imagine how easy life would be if that’s how it was:
“Yeah dude, the marriage didn’t work out because I got 73 out of a 100 and I needed 80 to avoid divorce”
“No way Tom, can’t you resit the test?”
“Yes, maybe I could do that. I’ll check in the morning Frank”.
“Good luck Tom. It happened to me once, but I got 82 the second time around, then we went on holiday to Bali”.
But life is never easy, not like that…
I have always led my life with the best of intentions towards people. I am human and I make mistakes, but I know I’m a legend in my own lunchtime, so the truth is there was nothing I was aware of that I could have done any differently. I never realised that back then so it cut away at my self esteem and I couldn’t focus on anything for a while. Every day I went to work every fibre of my being didn’t want to go in there and listen to prats on the phone tell me their problems, because I had problems of my own more important than what the punchcard dictated.
It was a great relief to me when they ended my contract at that place. I’d been getting in late and my cards were marked. They gave me zero notice so I had to delete a shit ton of emails off the computer at work before I drove off into the sunset. I actually drove to the kebab shop and had a chicken burger to celebrate being ‘terminated’. Chicken never tasted so good, even if it was the impoverished version.
There was a guy at work who was leaving shortly before I realised I was about to be terminated. I remember him saying on his last day, “Do you want to go for a beer after work” and I said no. I couldn’t tell him why, but the reason was I wanted to get home to see if she’d messaged me. That’s how lost I was. I did this every day for quite some time, because when you feel like you have lost something important to you, the only thing you can cling onto is hope.
Hope is something that people often marry at the hip. Fucking hope, for all that’s worth (it’s only as you get older you realise hope isn’t worth anything and you value yourself more. You realise you are a fucking diamond, but that’s a whole other story).
So what became of the girl from Love @ Lycos that I met and fell I love with, you may ask?
So
me time after she appeared one night on my AOL messenger, got chatting to me. We had a nice chat then out of the blue she told me she’d met some soldier who she ‘couldn’t pin down’ because a bird with wings needs to fly… or something. Yeah, that didn’t feel great, being told that, it was like one of those moments you see in a film where the person rubs it in that they’ve met someone else, as if you didn’t already know. A big block of salt to rub into a gaping wound would also have worked equally well.
I was resentful and deflated about that as I was already deeply affected by what had happened. All I could think to myself was, “Fuck the soldier and the horse he rode in on”. She told me he was a hero and I don’t doubt he was, but personally I couldn’t have cared if he was the Pope because my heart had just burst into little fragments via an online messenger update with my worst fears confirmed. She was now dating someone whom to all intents and purposes may as well have had a cameo role in Full Metal Jacket. Now it was my job to figure out how to glue them back together again while this guy was reporting for duty. If I was one of the Crankies I’d have crushed a grape, but I’m not, I’m a descendant of the vikings and those guys did things with a different swagger.
Did I mention that I’m proud my bloodline traces back to the Vikings? No, well I am anyway – just for the record.
Don’t misunderstand me, I still take full accountability for all my decisions and nobody is perfect, least of all me, so I know I could have handled certain things better, even back then. You play the game of life the way you know how to play it, and sometimes that means you don’t yet have all the cards needed to turn an unforeseen losing hand into a winning one. Sometimes you end up having to walk away from the table even if you still want to continue playing. Life is messy, you end up wading through shit with Wellington boots on at times, but you have to do that to get to the lovely field with the picnic hamper. That’s if Yogi Bear hasn’t already nicked it by the time you get there of course.
Shortly after that she moved to Leeds. You know the bit in the Godfather: Part 3 where he says, “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in”? Well, I heard off her again and ended up meeting her 3 times in Leeds. The first time was somewhat overwhelming, because when she broke up with me I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see her again, yet there she was in the flesh around 3 years later. The experience is a bit like being stuck out in the desert forever and a day… seeing nothing but a mirage in the distance, except when you finally get there you realise it isn’t a mirage at all. It’s REAL.
One of the times I even went to her house, but nothing lasting became of it, which I largely attributed to the long distance that was now between us, even if that was just me convincing myself that distance was the only obstacle. We watched Bill Bailey on TV and Zak barked at me in between strawberries, so for one evening it was like old times. The last time I went to see her I became ill on the train, so I wasn’t on top form and we just ended up falling asleep in separate beds in a hotel room, which wasn’t exactly the height of excitement for either of us, truth being told.
Whi
lst out at a pub with her, one time in Leeds, I did accidentally knock over a bottle of Budweiser on the table which dispensed said beer onto her lap with the same kind of precision only reserved for the likes of a marksman, making any would-be onlooker think she’d wet herself if she got up too hurriedly. She took it all in good spirits though and I remember being proud of her for retaining her sense of humour in the face of wet crotch adversity.
I heard off her again a 2 or 3 more times over the years. The last time was her suggesting we met, but it never happened. A case of ‘close but no cigar’. I don’t think I ever got an apology for the way she ended things with me either, not that I expected one after all that time. I find that people don’t apologise much these days, it’s a sorry state of affairs (couldn’t resist the pun).
I think in the end she blocked me after I asked her how things were, like I hadn’t already been rejected by her enough already lol. In the end you realise there is nothing to be had. For those that do it’s a bit like betting on a 3-legged horse in the Grand National. You might have a 1000-1 slip but it doesn’t mean it will ever pay out.
It was Felix Dennis who said, “Never go back. Never go back. No-one is waiting and nothing is there”. Actually, that’s so good I will post it here below as he was a bit of a poet doncha know:
It’s all a shame isn’t it really, how things works out sometimes but these are the trials and tribulations of life that few people truly escape. I never forget anything that happens to me but I learn from it all and honestly, that is all any of us can do.
I learned to love myself again and it’s all a learning curve. I am still sentimental and nostalgic, but nowhere near as much as I used to be. I got sick of people that treat others badly and speaking personally, I cut them out of my life, which wasn’t always an easy decision. I just haven’t got time for people that don’t value me, because I know my worth.
And if you have ever gone through anything like this, which the vast majority of people have, you should know your worth too. Don’t let anyone treat you in a way that is less than you deserve. I’m not just talking about relationships either, I’m talking about family and (often so-called) friends as well.
Going back to Love @ Lycos – it was a cool site, I’m glad i used it and I regret nothing. In an alternate universe I could have met the woman of my dreams. That’s the dice you roll when you play the game of dating and love isn’t it.
Did Lycos live up to its billing? Well, yes and no. I can’t say that it was impossible to find love on there as I’m sure there would be people together to this day as a result of that site. They had a good TV advertising campaign back then which would have attracted new people actually interested in dating.
For me it was a blessing in the beginning, but the ending was like suddenly realising you were in a kayak and a drop into the waterfall was fast approaching, with no way to turn around.
The bit where it probably fails is that it’s all a bit random, but then that’s what life is and I don’t think you can put a bunch of traits into an algorithm and have it spit out the perfect partner, so I don’t think online dating has advanced a great deal since 2003. If anything it’s become dumbed down with swipes and apps, making these things more of a pickup paradise, for want of a better expression.
People that desire something more meaningful are probably better off bumping into someone in supermarket and talking to them about the price of cabbages or something. It’s pretty easy to get chatting to someone if you have interesting fruit and vegetables in the near vicinity, that’s what I find.
Some people are also addicted to using dating sites and have been on them for years – I think some of them don’t actually date anyone, they’re spending all their life looking for the virtual equivalent of Prince Charming, which is pretty sad.
Newflash: He/She doesn’t exist on a dating site.
It would be a lot easier if these people had truthful usernames like: “Endlessly Fussy Sarah”, “Diana The Disney Dreamer” or “Only Here for The Bants Amy”.
The odds aren’t great, if you’re looking for love online in several wrong places, but you have to be in it to win it. As for this story about Love @ Lycos, well it could have been about anyone. Maybe I made it all up for entertainment/illustrative purposes and I have an overactive imagination? I’ll leave you to decide that one for yourself.
If she ever reads this I don’t know what she would think and it’s not my place to make any assumptions. I last heard off her a few years ago and since she blocked me on Facebook and LinkedIn (for good measure, even though I don’t use that for bugger all as I have no need to. I happen to think LinkedIn is full of pretentiousness, twats and biz speak), I doubt she’d ever wade all the way through this anyway.
No matter, I felt it was something worth writing as a doff of my hat to a moment in time, when internet and people collided in the form of dating before it became really mainstream with swipe right/left apps that have overcrowded the space.
I’ve published it now and it’s out into the universe. This blog will not be expiring any time soon either, so it’s here to stay for a good few years yet. All 6000+ words of it (lol). If you had any experiences on Love @ Lycos in the dim and distant past, I’d love to hear them. I’d also like to hear the success stories as well from people still together – how nice is that thought.
I did read on Twitter, during the course of my Love@Lycos research, that one person met his now wife in 2002 on that dating site and is till with her in 2025. That is absolutely shamazeballs isn’t it.
You see kids, sometimes that are happy endings and fairytales can come true. As Del Boy would say, “You’ve got to have a dream”.
Until next time dear reader. Let’s play this one out with a song called Ignition by R Kelly… and if my story is to be believed, I’m only including it because we had this thing going between us at the time related to the track . It’s a bit unfortunate R Kelly is now a high profile criminal but this was more innocent times: Can I get a *beep beep*…