Old-Fashioned #Love and Match.com Parties

I just got married. Unlike other, more social-media savvy couples, we did not assign a hashtag to our wedding. And even though I have many Twitter and Facebook connections, I didn’t post live updates of our special day online. My husband David actually doesn’t use Twitter, and he never plans on creating a Facebook profile. (Sorry, Randi!)

While David keeps his digital thumbprint at a minimum, my work as an author and performer actually depends on the opposite. Yet, I, too, strive to keep my personal life more on the private side. Needless to say, our marriage was announced in The New York Times, but we will never be “Facebook official.” Like Randi’s new book, Dot Complicated, suggests, it is, in fact, complicated.

To add to the perplexity of it all: guess where I met my stealthy husband who likes to fly below the Internet radar? Online. I’ve heard it said that you can’t buy love, but David costs me exactly $63.93— the cost of a three-month subscription to Match.com.

Another unusual point related to our meeting over the Internet is that, at the time, I despised online dating. Those two words conjured up a mixture of disappointment, depression, exhaustion, and shear annoyance. After years of online rejection and failure, I was bound and determined to meet someone the “old-fashioned” way— through a friend, my work, or in the grocery store checkout line.

Anywhere but the Internet.

Then my tech-smart friend and coauthor Jennifer J. Thomas, a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School, entered the picture. After many years of leading cognitive-behavioral therapy groups for women struggling with eating disorders, Dr. Thomas began to believe that a similar format might actually help some of her single girlfriends (like me) in their dating struggles. So, after one writing session for our book Almost Anorexic at her home in Boston, she held an impromptu, informal “Match.com party.” This essentially meant the main objective was “exposure therapy,” as she says, to encourage her single friends to create online dating profiles.

To continue reading, please click here for the original blog entry on Randi Zuckerberg’s DotComplicated.co.