Online Communication's Role in My Relationship

This picture was taken at my boyfriend's brother's wedding. He remains very close with his family and so we go to family dinners quite often. I have not connected with any of his family on online platforms but I have managed to form a good relationship with all of them despite this. 

 Currency, I am in a committed relationship that has been going on for almost a year in a half. Moving to Corvallis from my hometown in New Mexico, I knew only one person from my graduating high school class who was also moving to Oregon. I had no other friends or even family remotely close by. Being an introvert, it has always been really hard for me to make new friends, especially since everything my freshman year was online. 

A month before I left New Mexico, my best friend had moved away. On one of our multi-hour late-night phone calls, she decided to sign me up for a dating app as a joke despite me being against them because one of her friends had signed her up the night before. Originally, I downloaded the app and signed in so I could delete the account.. When I got in, I clicked on the first profile it brought up. Call it social curiosity, I wanted to see the types of people who used online dating. I was also curious what 20 year old called themselves Joe because, in New Mexico, everyone goes by Joseph.

 I was immediately intrigued when I saw his answer to one of the questions asked. The prompt read something along the lines of ‘What’s one of your pet peeves?’ His answer was “When people who like Harry Potter call themselves nerds, stop trying to steal our brand. Nerds do multivariable calculus and like it!” I was immediately hooked so I liked his profile. Within the hour I received a message from him. After talking the entire week I was driving from NM to OR, we decided to get coffee when I got to town. That “coffee” turned into a 5-hour long walk around a 2 block radius talking about everything we could think of. 

On our fourth date, he took me flying in his grandfather's plane. We flew to New Port where we went on quite the adventure to find beach access. The only time either of our phones was visible was to take this picture and to keep track of how long until we had to take off again.

The dating app itself was the medium through which we were able to enter both the initiation and experimentation of our relationship. Without that app, the likelihood that I would have met this guy was almost nonexistent because even though we both attend OSU, we were in two very different majors and never would have crossed paths. 

Once we had met each other in person, we rapidly moved through the intensifying and then eventually the integrating phase of the Knapp’s model. I was glad to know someone in Corvallis that was intelligent and knew how to hold an actual conversation. He does not have social media and we both agreed text messages were not the best way to get to know each other so we hung out 4 times within the first week of meeting in person for the first time. Now, here we are a year and a half later, living together with two cats and a dog. 

The newest addition to our family, Rhea. She is a very big troublemaker and she knows it. she has gotten much, much bigger since this photo was taken. We were actually able to find her through Facebook. A woman had a litter of German Shephard puppies and we saw she had one left through her Facebook posts.

This is Apollo, my little sweet boy🐈. One Sunday while Joe and I were eating breakfast he decided we should get a kitten that day. Thanks to Craigslist, we were able to find this sweet little orange boy who needed a home. We gladly drove to Portland within the hour to pick him up and take him home to his poor, unsuspecting big sister Artemis.

Online communication allowed me to find someone in Corvallis that I could talk to and get to know before I ever left New Mexico. This eased my nerves about moving to a state I had never been to before where I didn’t know anyone. We were able to plan our first date and then regularly when we were not together. However, after I moved in, we have since stopped using it aside from maybe a single text message a day. This relationship has also taught me to be on my phone less and spend more time with those people actually present with me. This has helped me create the same bond and more with someone in just a few months that it took me years to develop with my best friend. 

After having been dating for 6 months, Joe and I went to Ohio to see my mother for Spring Break. We picked up one of my mom's friends who was stranded on the side of the road with a flat and decided to all go out to get some food. On a whim, we decided to head to Mexico the next morning.  We all had an absolute blast. Once again, the only time any of us pulled out our phones was to take pictures or keep family in the States updated.