IIRC Jason Scott's BBS documentary mentions this a bit. There's a couple that shows up a number of times that met on a BBS.
Probably right. I don't really get the stigma, but I've known a few people personally who told the same lie and found later it was online. One in particular had a huge elaborate story about their bar meeting. His wife told me later one day he basically selected her from a website.
So like most questions, probably worth taking self reporting with a giant dose of salt.
Rewatch wargames and note how insane the kids skills are, and how this acts as something which makes the MC more interesting to the fairer sex. Compare this to today, where busting a command line out in public is more likely to get you arrested by some idiot dogooder thinking you’re hacking the airplane instead of acting as some kind of evidence that you’re intelligent and thus possibly good partner.
Meanwhile go to the third world where life is hard and stereotypical “jocks” or “bullies” are the poor, downtrodden of society. Often these societies love nerds and cerebral people, and physical prowess isn’t valued as much here.
John Hughes is the father of the modern western incel and all related phenomenons.
When an older, morbidly obese person is with a much more attractive and younger foreign person, you can work out most of the details in your head. Is it not more embarrassing to make up some Top Gun-esque story? I don't know.
I met my first wife in person, second on Facebook(8ish years and going). I feel zero shame in the meeting place, more shame for having married the first. So yes, personally, I don't understand the stigma.
this one, about two people having met online, was written in 1879 (not a typo):
The subjective answer to this question might be at least part of this statistic.
Also you may be underestimating the number of people who pair up as part of nightlife outings. Based on my many many outings in cities around the world in recent years it does seem at a glance that people are still engaged in the practice.
- in 1940, the top 3 were: met through family, met through friends, met in primary school. In that order, but pretty much equal
- From 1940-1980, two of those three (family, primary school) trended sharply downward, as did "met in church", while these trended upward: met through friends, met in bar or restaurant, met as or through coworkers, met in college. "met through friends" was by far the most common circa 1980
- starting in 1995 "met online" sees a sharp rise, and by 2010 it has overtaken them all.
The only other category that was still on the rise after 2010 was "met in a bar or restaurant". Is that really increasingly common? I have a strange feeling that some of those are just people too embarassed to say they met online...
Anyway, my point is there was (perhaps unsurprisingly) already a big shift going on 1940-1980, namely that the immediate family, church, childhood friends became less dominant in people's lives and friends, work, commercially-facilitated interactions (bars and restaurants) became more central. Did we learn anything from that adjustment? Were people in the 80's and 90's talking ad worrying about this the way we're talking today about the way social interactions are replacing the "old" ones?
(also, the values for "met online" on that graph seem to be small but non-zero in the 1980s! I'd like to hear the stories of some of those couples...)