Dawn’s parents were terrified for her, and her coworkers joked that she was going to meet Ted Bundy.

“You just don’t understand!” Dawn said. “We get each other! It’s just meant to be.”

To round out the almost unbearably 1990s nature of their romance, for their first date, James took her to a Cranberries concert. They were married within a year.

Talking to these couples, I didn’t sense a shred of embarrassment from them about how they met. Granted, neither couple generally admits how they met, other than to close friends. The Buckleys still say “rugby” and the Wrights say “through a friend.” But both couples leapt at the chance to be interviewed, and they seemed to remember unusually rich details about their interactions. More importantly, they are happy they met online, even though doing so was considered strange at the time.

Terri did not want to settle for whoever was in her small town. Plus, she liked the freedom of her email courtship. She felt like she could say anything to Tom, and like she and Tom had actually communicated more than the average couple before they began dating in person. Between their phone calls and dates, she had the emails to reread and reflect on. “When we met in person,” she told me, “I felt like I had known him for a long time.”

Dawn said something similar, that she felt she and James were more authentic over email than they could be in typical dates. Dawn thought James seemed bolder and more romantic than most men. James found “the whole computer thing” intriguing. No one was writing personal emails at the time, and it added some excitement to the dating grind. James liked women who tried new things, and email, at the time, was definitely one of them.

For pioneers like Dawn and James, breaking the norm helped set them apart. It also brought them together.

In an experiment265 in the early 1960s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram found that 65 percent of his subjects would be willing to administer a shock of 450 volts—equivalent to being stung by a bee with a six-inch stinger—despite266 the protestations of their supposed victim (the victim was actually an actor, and the shocks weren’t real).

To Milgram, it was another sign that ordinary people could behave in extraordinarily evil ways. “Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded; daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances,” he wrote.267 “These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders.”