I met my first girlfriend through Windows 95: An Internet love story

Nearly 19 years ago, I said "I love you" to a girl, face-to-face, for the first time. It's a moment I remember clearly: Flowers. A ring. An awkward kiss. Both of our moms hovering around since each had driven us three hours to a halfway point.

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It was weird like any early teenage romance, but this particular iteration of adolescent awkwardness remains unique even in retrospect.

My "I love you moment"—like any sense memories from my teenage years of 1996-98—mostly revolves around my bedroom. Here I hid from the feeling that I didn’t fit in at my high school, from feeling inferior to my siblings, from my parents’ dissolving marriage. And luckily I had quite the hiding place: a nook on the room’s far wall, sectioned off in such a way that the light from a single window, the sound from a nearby stereo, and the glow from an overweight CRT monitor filled the whole space.