I Learned To Love Online. Now Every Romance Leaves An Internet Trail.

The first friend I made online was a girl named Bella. At least that’s how she was known to me—I’ve since learned her real name, which sounds nothing like Bella but has the same feeling. We met in the comments on The Clique author Lisi Harrison’s blog, Blah-g. Suddenly, my life was online.

From Blah-g, I met more internet crushes on Twitter, and soon after, on Tumblr. Tumblr is where I met my first and only girlfriend at age 14. It ended disastrously, the only way it could have for two lonely girls living in Arkansas and England, respectively. Despite that, she became one of my closest friends. The relationship rested on a digital foundation: images of girls with their temples pressed together, excerpts from love poetry, gifs of favorite TV couples. Even after our weeks-long relationship ended, we continued to send each other poems we’d written about our doomed romance (always screenshots from the Notes app). We dreamed of traveling Europe together and had tags on our Tumblrs to match. We're still in touch — just last spring, I went to London and visited her.

I don’t get embarrassed talking about that relationship any more than you would talking about a high school fling. I don’t need to give you the stats on how many people meet their significant others on dating apps now (about 70% of us, according to Forbes). My ex and I were just two people experimenting with dating online before it became popular, before Hinge existed, before we were old enough to be flirting online at all. But the way we came together has shaped all of my romances since then. It seemed entirely natural to scroll through someone’s likes on Twitter or read into their Spotify playlists. I know now it’s totally psychotic, but most of my friends do the same things, too.