According to an article in Aftonbladet, the internet has given our very first love a better chance to reflourish. It’s easier to look people up and regain contact via e-mail and chat. I will tell you about my first love another time, but the article did inspire me to take a few minutes and find out what happened to my husband’s old girlfriend and my old boyfriend. Are they married? What are they doing? Where do they live? Any kids?
When D. the guitar-playing redhead and I went separate ways, he was studying cultural geography at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. 5 minutes search on the internet let me know that he got married in Paris in 2004 (to a former room-mate of ours which he started dating around our break-up), he works as a web-designer for a prestigious PR-company in Stockholm, and he runs marathons. I even found a newly taken picture of him. He has a receeding hairline. Imagine that.
We already knew my husband’s ex J. the writer got married because she sent the Husband her wedding photo. We also knew where she lives and what she is doing because she sent the Husband samples of her work; she is an editor at a publishing house in Cincinnati, Ohio. I found several pictures of her, and on some odd website I read her story about how she met her husband in the Czech Republic in 1998. I read it out loud to my husband who immediately identified his own mentioning in the text (in bold):
“He was a master's student at a Prague university, studying computer science. I myself was a few months' shy of a bachelor's in writing. Our interests were polar opposites, ones and zeroes. [..] At the time, I was looking for a maudlin Continental philosopher who lived in a mostly depressive, reflective state -- not a man with a positive, idealist outlook who spent nights programming, networking and hacking”.
The Husband is not in a depressive state, however perhaps reflective. He is though, most certainly, a Continental philosopher; by the end of this year, if all goes smoothly, he should be a professor of Continental philosophy.
It has been 10 years: things have changed; our former friends have changed. Somehow the internet provides us not only with a search portal, however, but also a time portal, with the ability to reduce the time that passes between the meetings. We are able to reconnect with people we once loved, or at least find out that they are doing well and that they, like we did, moved on. If I were to run into D. the guitar-playing redhead tomorrow, it wouldn’t have been 10 years anymore, because I just saw him last week.
By Lovain
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