| Online dating may be terrible, but at least New Yorker writers can mine it for laughs. This morning’s Daily Shouts, by the contributor Jenny Arimoto, imagines a day in the life of a certain type of Internet guy, a schedule packed with pedantry, mansplaining, and general cluelessness. In 1997, the writer Meghan Daum took a more serious approach to the subject, reflecting on a relationship that began via e-mail. By digital standards, it was a distant time, when AOL and chat rooms dominated, and the concept of being “a computer person” still meant something. (Nowadays, everyone has to be a computer person.) Daum, then twenty-six, recalls her prospective boyfriend’s opening line—“is this the real meghan daum?”—and takes the reader along as their connection develops. The technology may have been different, but certain behaviors transcend era, whether or not a keyboard is involved. Daum admits to concealing some of her less attractive qualities—“Pete knew nothing of my scattered, juvenile self, and I did my best to keep it that way”—and describes the cocktail of excitement and anxiety that preceded their first date. What Daum considers an “E-mail affair” doesn’t turn out quite as she envisioned, but the safety of the screen offers certain advantages, still novel at the time. “It was a dare,” she writes of the experience, “I wouldn’t have taken in three dimensions.” | 
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