How Did People Used To Meet Anyway?

After reading that NYT Sunday Magazine piece about online dating, I suddenly couldn't remember how people used to meet before email and online stuff ... let me think back. Oh yeah, I met some of my early boyfriends ...

in college,
at my first job,
through family friends one summer weekend,
at a party at a friend's house,
at grad school,
at grad school,
at grad school,
and then my husband ...
he was a friend of a previous boyfriend and came to speak at a conference I was running.

I got a chance to know them, (and they me) by watching them, working with them, knowing their friends, even knowing some of their past girlfriends, long before we were doing anything intimate. But one thing that surprised me, reading that article is the "disconnectedness" and lack of social screening there is now, which you could rely on in the old days. Most of the guys I dated came through our social network so you knew a lot about them through family or friends or co-workers right off. There wasn't a sense they were just floating out there in cyberspace. That part is a little frightening. To really know nothing about someone ...