The second the world logged on for the first time, it began. The online crush. We started to fall for people who’d only forked over an A/S/L, and let’s be honest – those three descriptors were never honest. However, we allowed ourselves to fall for whoever was on the other side of those initial chat rooms because it was a new level of thrill for everyone as the internet was a new landscape to discover. Only many wouldn’t realize until many, many years later that those early habits would continue to engrain themselves into our everyday lives.
This week our guest Victor from The Liquor Talk Podcast came through to talk about falling for someone online, only to – well, you’ll have to listen to hear how it panned out IRL. Right now, let’s keep the focus back on the evolution of the online crush and how it’s usually a letdown.
Fire was to cavemen what chat rooms were to prepubescents in the ‘90s, and most definitely in the early 2000s. Many kids found themselves entranced by the robotic orgy sounds of AOL gearing up to take them on explorations beyond their wildest imaginations. Chat rooms and messenger boards that now look like they belong in the Smithsonian, but at the time they were the future and the thrilling present all wrapped up in one.
Some kids were wise enough to know it was just fun messaging strangers, but there was and still is a huge danger because creeps stumbled upon the World Wide Web as soon as it was available and used it…well, just watch the pilot for ‘Degrassi: The Next Generation.’ Emma was almost taken full advantage of in a hotel room when the kid she was chatting with wound up being a grown man.
Emma, like many, would fall prey to the allure of AIM, and the excitement felt when a screen name popped up on the screen. It was the first of many online addictions that would follow and would set the stage for an entire generation. Those tweens and teens then became patient 0 for the next wave of the internet; LiveJournal and MySpace. The latter may as well be referred to as the gramophone of social media. Everything about MySpace was designed to showcase a personality from the layout design to the song choice to the Top 8 friends you deemed worthy – even if everything you placed on your page was a lie, it didn’t matter. Others could then judge you by your page and decide whether or not you were cool. It was the next evolution of an online crush. Chat rooms drew up the plans, but MySpace poured the concrete.
One could list every social media that Tom from MySpace, in a way, helped birth but this is not my senior thesis. It’s a post about online crushes and how they came to be, and it boils down to the idea that online, you can really be anyone you want to be if you choose. I mean, have you ever met someone online, and then in real life they are nothing like their tweets or posts and you think, hmm…okay? That’s because some people hide who they are behind an online facade, and not just in the catfishing way where the hot model turns out to be a 48-year-old man named Ted who works at the one Radio Shack holding on for dear life in Nebraska. It’s also personality-based, which is often more disappointing.
When it comes to meeting online, be it romantic or not, it’s always important to meet those people before engaging too much because it could lead to a dead end. And it’s not always about meeting in person. It can also mean hopping on Zoom and just getting that face-to-face interaction, which a screen may be between you but at least you’ll get to see the person and find out if there is a genuine human behind the online persona. Now, was Victor’s online crush a happily ever after, or was it an instance of doing one thing online that sent mixed signals? Listen and find out
Crushgasm 
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