My boyfriend and I met online. Not, we are quick to point out,
on a dating site, even though certain friends of ours persist in
a tautological assessment of the matter: Did you meet on a
website? Yes. Are you dating? Yes. Well then it's a dating
website! Sigh. Okay. Whatever.  But this lady might protest too
much. I am, after all, an enthusiastic fan of online
matchmaking, not least for its astonishing properties as a kick
in the ass to get a lovelorn singleton out of her incestuous
postcollege friend group and make her aware of a slightly
different, although quite possibly demographically parallel,
milieu.  In fact, back before we knew of each other's existence,
Mr B and I were both members of actual-for-real dating site
Nerve.com. A few months ago, mushily talking about how happy we
were to have found one another, we wondered if we would have
wound up together had we found one another's Nerve profiles.
The short answer, after firing up the computer and remembering
ancient logons and passwords, was Absolute