Those of us old enough to remember the wonder of the original black screen with orange characters of Prodigy may have also been clobbered by the first wave of online dating.
I know I was.
Believe it or not youngsters, there was a day before match.com, chat rooms and IM where response times were just slightly better than the USPS and you paid (gasp) per message.
Yet somehow the safety of anonymity and the excitement of ideas found pairings in discussion lists with ponderdous threads.
Mine hit when I was a single parent with my own business spending all day working on my computer, taking a few hours to be an afterschool parent and then playing on the computer all night anonymously arguing politics one message unit at a time.
One of my fellow travelers had apparently spent some time in the city where I grew up. In fact, after a handful of emails landed over several days, we discovered we worked for competing media outlets there simultaneously. We knew each other by reputation and a vague 10-year old mental image. We had never met.
We lived 1200 miles and a time zone apart, but had so much in common. Within weeks he was my only correspondent, primarily because he was simply perfect.
He understood everything about me and my life. He was smart, funny, passionate and clearly head and shoulders above anyone I could possibly meet locally if I were so inclined. I was not.
Soon he was staying late at his office as we burned up the WATTS line talking for hours on the phone each night after my daughter was asleep. Did I mention he was perfect?
After a few months of this, our future plans became embarassingly grandiose. I had a picture of him in my wallet, on my desk and on my nightstand. I greeted every day amazed and grateful that technology could deliver a soulmate.
Our first meeting was to be a prelude to months of plans we gleefully committed. The only issue left to settle was which state we would choose to share happily ever after.
My daughter was away for the weekend and I don't want to tell you how long I took to dress the day I went to pick him up at the airport. It would be a little too humiliating to mention the hotel reservation I made between the airport and my house just in case we couldn't possibly make it that far.
The moment he stepped through the airport gate and hugged me was... horrendous.
There was absolutely no physical chemistry. We could write it and talk it like no tomorrow, but the meat and potatoes stuff just wasn't there. The things you learn day-in, day-out when you get to see more than the Greatest Hits Collection were instantly wrong.
He did not misrepresent himself in any way. He was/is an incredibly good man who was hurt badly by my rejection. But we both made the mistake of believing what we wanted to believe because we wanted to believe it. We were intelligent, lonely people who created a two-dimensional ideal that could not be real.
I thought of him again this week after seeing Dean's Iowa Scream and didn't feel as guilty about my old almost love.
Much of the media, much of the electorate, wanted to believe. We put his pictures on the cover of news magazines long before anyone had the exposure to annoint in that way. We so deparately needed someone to be all that. It's no coincidence that his campaign was built online. As I well know, things can be what we project them to be in this space.
It's the day-to-day real time reactions that make or break the deal. I never made it to the hotel on the way from that early 1990s airport run. I don't think Dean will make it to the White House on this run.
Monitors and computer graphics are so much faster and better now, but they can still only reflect what we want to see.