But dating-specific platforms, while useful, are only one part of the online love puzzle. And falling in love with someone you met online, without actually intending to do so, seems to be a particularly queer phenomenon. It spawned a whole genre of YouTube in the 2000s and early 2010s where lesbian YouTubers like Whitney and Megan (who met on Myspace in 2006) and Kaelyn and Lucy (who met over email in 2010) documented their long-distance relationships. It hid in anecdotes I’d heard from my own internet friends, like Mel, who met her wife on a forum in 2007. It is woven into my own life, too: in 2013 I met my wife through Tumblr when she lived over 500 miles away.