How I Met My Boyfriend on Twitter

In Arizona, January 2012

There are an infinite amount of ways to meet your significant other but I never thought mine would be through twitter. What started as a series of semi-professional DMs, blossomed into a full-blown romance. The reactions I get from people are totally mixed, but I don’t care because sometimes there are things too crazy to even try to explain.

Many of you know that I work as a part of a social media team that operates under Darren Rovell. We are constantly telling each other to follow certain people on twitter who we think are similar to the group. In mid October, @EliFromBrooklyn sent the team an email telling us to follow @Bairet. As with most of my new follows, I try to establish some sort of relationship (because you never know how these people are going to be able to help you in the future). I sent him a quick DM in response to one of his tweets and we started chatting back and forth.

This went on constantly for a few days until we started texting instead. A few weeks later, I was on my way to @AmandaRykoff’s birthday party at a bar in the West Village. I was underaged, alone, and had never met her before. I was so nervous that I called about 7 different people, none of whom picked up the phone. Finally I called Bairet and he calmed me down. After that night we began talking every day for several hours.

A week later I went home for the weekend and hung out with a new guy who I really liked. Whenever I wasn’t with this other guy, I was on the phone with Bairet. By this point we had become really good friends and could talk for hours without getting bored. Little did I know that we would talk until 2am and he had to get up for work at 4:30am. How he survived on so little sleep for that month, I’ll never know. My interest in this other guy slowly faded and I began to realize how much I was falling for Bairet. For weeks we played this game of saying we were “just friends” even though we knew deep down that it wasn’t going to stay that way for long.

One Saturday in early December, I was working and incredibly bored. I started to look up flights to Atlanta, where he lived. Suddenly I realized how feasible this trip would be. I sent him a text asking if he’d like to have dinner that night. He said he wished we could and then I posed the idea: “so I have this rental car I have to return to the airport anyway. I was thinking that since I’m already there I might as well hop on a plane to Atlanta”. He was either going to think it was incredibly awesome or creepy, but I was hoping for the former. He was so excited by the possibility that we were determined to make it happen.

I was working until 5pm in Newark, NJ and trying to get on a 7:05pm flight out of LaGuardia. By the grace of God, in those two hours I managed to drive all the way back to Queens, shower, pack, and get to the airport in time to buy a last-minute plane ticket. I ended up pleading with several ticket agents to let me buy a ticket, even though it was only 30 minutes before take off. There are few times it is acceptable to run in an airport, but this is one of them. I made it on board.

He met me at the airport 2 hours later in Atlanta and it was even better than imagined. I was only there for a day and a half but I knew it was the start of something very special. Plenty of my friends back home thought I was going to get murdered, but that had never stopped me before. We’ve seen each other multiple times since then with plenty of trips planned out for the future.

Being in a long distance relationship is never easy, but that’s what telephones and airplanes are for. I’ve heard every joke you can think of, “OMG WAS IT LOVE AT FIRST TWEET?!?” There’s plenty of speculation as to how this could ever work, especially from people who aren’t receptive to social media but I don’t care.

Sometimes “doing it for the story” is a good enough reason.

BONUS: He’s probably going to kill me for posting this, but he made me the most adorable video for Valentine’s Day: http://vimeo.com/36744843