We all remember our first crush. The embarrassment you would go through to figure out if your love was reciprocated or unrequited will stick with you forever. You’re not sure what to do with this feeling. Flirting is tough at first. That’s why we start out being mean or rocking girls in the face during dodgeball. Next thing you know, you’re calling her landline with your buddy and praying her Dad’s not on the other end. I remember in the third grade I bought my crush a key chain from Amish Country with her name on it and just left it in her desk. Horrible. When she found it and publicy asked the entire class who did it I refused to admit it was me. Horrible. Still haven’t admitted it. But, she did wind up being my first girlfriend cause a motherfucker had game.
But what was a stagnant and traditional process for decades had a wrench thrown into it with the introduction of the internet. We were pioneering new territory. Your older cousins or siblings could no longer give you advice because they were also making it up as they went. It was a cringey learning process.
Here is a list of methods I deployed throughout different stages of my youth. Some of them grammar school, some middle school, and others high school even. All terrible.
5. WCW
In terms of the timeline, this was the latest addition to social media flirting. But definitely still early in terms of Instagram days. Just raw psycho behavior from a bunch of horny dudes on the internet. Every Wednesday was littered with guys losing battles to their demons. They might of well just said “Hey you know who I really wanna fuck?” on a weekly basis. And we all just shrugged and accepted it. We even liked that shit like “hell yeah man, she’s hot.” I became a local hero for a week when I WCW’d Jeter’s girlfriend and she liked it.
4. Facebook Poking
As if Facebook was aware of how childish we all were, it allowed us to cyber poke each other without any explanation. No one knew why poking was there. Facebook never said “Hey this is how you’re supposed to utilize the poke.” The proverbial toe in the water if you would. I had a LINEUP of chicks I was Facebook poking. I shudder at the thought of people I used to poke. I mean, I was poking back and forth with girls for months that I had never even met. Or even spoken to. But it was the best notification to see pop up on your home page. Alarmingly red. It could also be used for relationship warfare. Get in your own head if someone didn’t poke you back for awhile. I remember when I was “talking to” this girl in high school we got into a fight and I didn’t poke her for weeks. The not poking turned into a bigger fight than the original argument. She hit me with a “Fine, I guess I’ll have to start poking other people then.” Poked her as soon as I got home after that.
3. MySpace Top 8
Every MySpace user was a King Arthur and was tasked with knighting their virtual Round Table. If you bumped someone down in your rankings, you better have an accusation that’ll stick. A social deathblow if you removed them entirely. But every Top 8 had at least one girl in it. Every Arthur needs a Guinevere. If you want to know who a guy “liked”, see what girl was in his Top 8. If you wanna know how close he was to landing her, listen to the song that played on his profile.
2. The MMT Treatment
Ok, this is a method that was only used by myself and my two friends, Mike and Matt. As far as I know anyway. It’s a bit niche but it’s easily the craziest way we chased girls on the internet. I wouldn’t admit to this if it didn’t have such a high conversion rate. Alright, what we would do is pick a girl we found attractive and then bombard her with notifications. We would kamikaze either a status she put up or a picture she posted. The lead guy would first comment something that makes sense with the context. Then the other two guys would essentially start a conversation with the first guy on her post. So say I was lead man and I commented on a picture and said “cute dog” or something. Then Mike would comment on the picture and say “Oh hey TKJ”. Followed by Matt going “Oh hey TKJ and Mike”. Then we’d basically start a group chat of the three of us on her picture talking about nothing of importance. The amount of notifications this girl would receive dictated acknowledgement. Two things would happen from there. Either she’d message us individually calling us crazy and we’d apologize for our friends’ behavior OR she’d jump in on the joke and join the conversation in the comments. The amount of girls numbers we got doing this simply didn’t make any sense. We started seeing a group of girls two towns over by implementing the MMT.
1. AIM Profiles
AIM was the first kind of social media that the world was introduced to. Yeah there was AOL but that was pretty much just glorified emailing. It didn’t have the profiles and away messages that AIM had. All the sequels to it have been bullshit. My AIM profiles had my favorite teams listed, who my best friends were, and a song lyric ranging anywhere from Led Zepplin to the latest Ludacris bop. I don’t know if this was regional thing or who started it, but I can confirm this happened in my area. You’d hit enter a bunch of times so people had to scroll all the way down to the very bottom where it would say “i like *******”. Good luck cracking that code. Asterisking out your crush’s name was all the rage on AIM. Some psychos would even have multiple redacted names, “i like ******* or *****”. Look at Casanova over here. If your asterisks changed and you lost or gained characters, it was major news. If you were online the conversation boxes would pop up all over your desktop. If you changed it and mic dropped by signing off, people would flood your landline demanding you “Get on AIM now!” Such a rush if you’re crush had the “i like…” section of their profile. If your name didn’t line up with the amount of asterisks, you’d immediately go through the seven stages of grief. But if you did have the right amount of letters for their little code? No better feeling in the world.
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It’s both comical and humiliating looking back at the lengths we would go for a girlfriend we were scared to talk to in real life. If I’m being honest it’s probably when I peaked. It was such a wholesome and harmless time. Even though our parents believed that putting our intimate thoughts on the internet was a death sentence. I guess that’s the way of things though. Cause I’m nervous for the kids today. I didn’t have Snapchat or Tik Tok in those formative years. What mortifying mistakes are the next generation going to make? Do they duet their crushes’ Tik Toks? Do they profess their love on Snapchat knowing it disappears? Those poor souls have no idea that these cringey pursuits for love are going to be in the back of their minds for the rest of their lives.
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