Before the rise of swiping left or right, there was an impression, milked by rom-coms, that soul mates “just found each other,” ideally by physically colliding in an art gallery. To admit that you were so lonely you were willing to put your information on the Internet—at a time when virtually nothing was on the Internet—was bold. And to some, it was weird.

Tom and Terri began emailing through their Netscape and AOL accounts, then moved on to phone calls. Because the calls were between the U.S. and Canada, they racked up $1,000 phone bills. When Terri wanted to email Tom, she had to be sure to tell her mom not to pick up the phone, because doing so would kill the dial-up connection.

After a few weeks, they agreed to exchange pictures. Neither had an Internet connection strong enough to upload a photo, so they had to send them through the postal service. After two weeks, both were relieved to open their envelopes and find the other person wasn’t secretly a senior citizen.

A few months later, they decided to meet in person, in Vancouver. Terri’s mom begged her not to go. “What if you get kidnapped?!” she asked. Terri’s coworkers wondered why she would do such a thing.

Terri told Tom to meet her at Starbucks in the airport—only to get there and realize there were several Starbucks in the airport. Three hours later, she finally found a man who looked like Tom’s photo wandering among the coffee shops in the slowly emptying terminal.

Terri and Tom didn’t know anyone else who had met online, so they told anyone who asked that they had met at a rugby match. A year and a half later, they were married in one of the first few Match.com weddings. They didn’t tell people how they met until their wedding day.

I heard a similar story from a woman named Dawn, who in 1994 was a twenty-four-year-old living in Annapolis. Unlike most people she knew, she had a computer, and one day she logged on to her Apple PowerBook, a gray beast of a thing, and went into a chat room, where she struck up a conversation with a military wife. The wife told Dawn she had a single friend who would love to have someone to talk to: Why doesn’t Dawn email him?

Dawn is the maternal type, and she liked the idea of having someone to emotionally tend to. The man Dawn ended up corresponding with was James Wright. James was a Marine going through naval flight school in Florida and had only gotten a computer so he could play Doom. But he, like Dawn, was curious. Before long, they were sending each other song lyrics and poetry. After a few months of emailing and phone calls, he mailed her a plane ticket. “I’ll be the half-Asian guy with a vest,” he wrote.