Forget Match.com.
The new hot place
for e-hookups
is Words With Friends.
This morning I heard a story on the radio about an unusual engagement. Megan Lawless and Jasper Jasperse met online. That doesn’t raise eyebrows the way it did ten years or so ago. The unusual part was that they met as “random opponents” playing the popular Zynga game Words With Friends. Players of this Scrabble-type game can choose to play against people they know, or hit random and be paired with an unknown player.
She was in Chicago. He was in the Netherlands. They began chatting through the game. Then emailing and Skyping. Ultimately, Jasper moved to Chicago, and the couple married this past July.
Stories like this make us smile. What a 21st century “meet cute.”
It’s nothing new, though. We’ve been searching for love in strange places since the 13th century:
“The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.”“Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek & find
all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.”
It’s not the where as much as the when. It’s not just about finding the right person, it’s about being the right person, about breaking down those internal boundaries. Words with Friends, introduced by friends, met in the grocery store, met on Reddit, longtime friends or nearly strangers–how you meet is not important. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first time you’ve fallen in love, or even if it’s the last. It doesn’t matter if you are ready for it. It doesn’t matter if it knocks you on your ass and leaves you clueless as to what to do about it. You could even go as far as to say, it doesn’t really matter if it all “works out.”
Breaking down those barriers, breaking open your heart–that’s what matters. Another wise poet (more recent than Rumi) said it perfectly:
“It matters not
Who you love
Where you love
Why you love
When you love
Or how you love
It matters only that you love.”
~ John Lennon
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