Twitter Friends - What a Gift

I met my husband online.  That’s right… we met when I posted a personal ad way back when AOL was just starting and dial up was all the rage.  There were no pictures… nobody had digital cameras and scanners were the main source of image transfers.  There was no Google.  He read my ad.  He emailed me.  I emailed him back.  And so it continued.

We never saw each other.

I think we must have emailed for several weeks before I had the courage to give him my phone number.  My land line phone number.  I didn’t have a cell phone.  I didn’t even know what a cell phone was.  It was the era of the pager.  

We talked on the phone… a lot.  He was persistent.  He asked me to meet him.  I put it off as long as I could.  We finally agreed to meet for dessert one night.  Not dinner.  Just dessert.  That way, it was an hour tops and we would be out of there.  So we met.

Now the point is not what happened after that… obviously we ended up married with children.  The issue is the fact that we never saw each other before that first date.  Not once.  No pictures.  We didn’t have a clue what each other looked like.

Twitter is very much the same as blind dating.  Although some of us have pictures as our avatars and post pictures of our families on our blogs, many of us don’t.  We “talk” to each other every day.  We commiserate about our problems, we give each other advice.  We laugh, we cry, we empathize.  We don’t know each other.  Many of us have no idea what each other looks like.  I love it.

I wonder how many of us would meet and befriend each other?  My guess would be not many of us.  Why?  Because the old “first impression” would get in the way.  Yes it would.  You know it would.  You might see someone too thin, too heavy, too tattooed, too old, too young… and you would not even entertain the idea that you could become friends.

That’s what I truly love about twitter.  Nobody cares.  It’s all about who we are.  What we say, what we feel, what we think.  We get to see the “inside” before we see the “outside”.  What a gift.  To be able to choose a friend based solely on their words.

If I had seen my husband before I had gotten to know him, would I have gone out with him?  Maybe, but maybe not.  I might have passed up an amazing guy just because I wasn’t really into the tall, bald, goatee looking man all dressed in black.  That wasn’t who he was - just a poor choice of outfit.

So to all the men and women on twitter who I look forward to talking to every day… I am proud to call you all friends.  Because it’s only what’s on the inside that really counts.