The year: 2006.
The month: April.
I know that doesn't sound like all that long ago, but we're here to tell you that, yes, it is. It's extremely long ago. Apple had yet to even confirm the existence of the iPhone, let alone start selling it, and most people were predicting that while it would lack extensive bells and whistles, its calls would be crystal-clear and never dropped.1 The American box office was dominated by films in the Ice Age and Scary Movie franchises, both of which would soon be abandoned due to their abysmal quality.2
And, more pertinent to the story at hand, the ubiquitous online meet market Match.com was in the process of launching a more intricate offshoot entitled Chemistry.com.
Online dating spots, as we all know, represent a fairly high-stakes crapshoot. You might end up frustrated and demoralized, or you might find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. (We know; we've experienced both outcomes.) Most websites do not entail this level of existential risk.3 The potential for disaster notwithstanding, we both went ahead and signed up for a free trial of this intriguing new digital matchmaker. We answered its exhaustive questionnaire, from the basic likes/dislikes stuff all the way through to the kind-of-bizarre "interpret this pretend voicemail from a hypothetical significant other" exercise at the end. And once we finished running that psychosocial gantlet, Chemistry.com rewarded us with personalized lists of potential mates.
At this point you're probably dying to know: Which was it? Was Nick on Alexis's list, or was Alexis on Nick's list? (Okay, fine, "dying to know" is a bit strong. More likely you're dying to know who'll be cut next on Project Runway, or how Jacob made Richard Alpert live forever. As far as the topic in question is concerned, "mildly curious" is probably more accurate. But we digress.) The answer is: Nick was on Alexis's list. Sitting in her hamster-sized Venice studio4, she looked over Nick's profile and, suitably intrigued, clicked the button to inform Chemistry.com of her interest.
Those precious few bytes of I-wanna-get-to-know-you data were then whisked along the fiber optic superthingy until they arrived inside a laptop on a rickety Ikea desk in the bedroom of a first-floor apartment in Palms. Nick looked at Alexis's profile, read her microbiography, scanned her likes and dislikes, and decided that this preliminary interest was indeed mutual. The next logical step would be an in-person meeting, right? HA! Not even close. Chemistry.com's stringent e-dating rules first required that we undergo a brief question-and-answer round with one another, for which we were allowed to make up our own questions or use some of the site's pre-written queries (e.g., "Do you visit this URL often?"). After that, we moved on to analogies and reading comprehension.
Finally, once we were both (reasonably) sure that the other party was neither creepy nor a robot, we were permitted to send notes to each other via the Chemistry.com system. (Because clearly, giving out our actual e-mail addresses would be severely premature at this point.) We volleyed some witty repartee back and forth for a week or so, and then finally -- finally! -- Nick raised the possibility of actual, corporeal interaction without the benefit of a backspace key, i.e., a date.
We met up at a Coffee Bean in Santa Monica on May 8th and immediately began sharing our most annoying encounters with parking enforcement authorities. (I'm guessing this topic has been used to break the ice on many an L.A.-based first date, since our meter maids are all a bunch of puppy-kicking maniacs who sell poison milk to schoolchildren and never recycle.5) Every May 8th since, we've revisited that location and attempted to replicate that conversation as accurately as possible; it's our small (and kind of silly) way of marking the night that everything changed for both of us, even if we were only dimly aware of it at the time.
3Stuff On My Cat, for example.
