Alexis Grant sent out a jokey tweet — not her forte in the first place — and didn’t think much of it. Sure, she usually tweeted about professional things, but why not joke about the type of man she’s looking for.
One fateful day in 2011, Grant posted: “Twitter: I would like a smart, outdoorsy guy around 30yo, based near [Washington] DC. Bonus points for stubble. Go.”
Innocuous enough, right? It was, perhaps, the best thing she ever did. That’s how Grant met her husband. He messaged her — a bit of bravery — and struck up a conversation. He was moving to Washington DC soon from London, UK, and perhaps they could be friends.
“We always talk about how serendipitous it was and how lucky we are that it happened,” Grant said in a phone conversation. “I didn’t know who he was and he didn’t know who I was. So even though we were following each other, we weren’t really familiar with each other at all. So it was just really lucky that he had seen that tweet.”
More than a decade later, they’re married parents living in West Virginia. After that initial DM, they chatted some more and found out they had lots of shared interests, especially a love for hiking. Eventually they met in person and became friends. With time, that friendship turned into a relationship and marriage.
“We always talk about how serendipitous it was and how lucky we are that it happened.”
Grant, 42, runs a company called They Got Acquired, while her now-husband, Ben Collins, is an entrepreneur and tech expert. They were following each other because they were both young professionals interested in traveling. But they didn’t know one another at all. Through good luck, it turned into the rest of lives. That’s part of the magic of using Twitter as a dating app — it’s a social media platform where you follow folks with similar interests and goals, and often a similar sense of humor. That’s a pretty decent foundation for a relationship, no?
Grant is far from the only person to meet a significant other via Twitter. Search the hashtag #WeMetOnTwitter and you’ll see lots of folks with a similar story. In a time when Twitter is falling apart, and in the wake of all the awful things that happen on the platform, there are also, oddly, lots of wonderful love stories that began on Twitter.
Ali Garland, a travel blogger, stumbled into love on Twitter. And, unlike Grant, it was completely accidental. Garland was trying to get her blog up-and-running back in 2010 but wasn’t sure how to set up the hosting for the site. The person who stepped in to help? Her future husband Andy.
“I was living in Atlanta [Georgia], and he was in Germany, so he stayed up late to help me when I got off work,” Garland wrote in an email. “That easily could’ve been the end of it, but I started messaging him questions about how he had moved from the U.S. to Germany, and our conversations were really easy and fun.”
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Soon enough they were Skyping and realizing there was a real connection. Of course, there were the problems of distance and time zones. Just details.
“It might sound a little weird, but he told me he loved me before we even had webcams, just a handful of pictures on Facebook until that point,” Garland said.
“It might sound a little weird, but he told me he loved me before we even had webcams.”
Thankfully, Garland, again, a travel blogger, already had a trip planned to Prague over Thanksgiving. After four months of chatting online, they met IRL they decided to meet up in Prague. It went great and she was back in Europe to see Andy by New Year’s. A few weeks later they were planning a wedding. They’ve been married for 12 years, with Garland making the move to Germany and never looking back.
Twitter isn’t just good for finding marriages in an unlikely manner. Lots of relationships start via Twitter crushes.
Selin Ceren Uzman, a 21-year-old student at NYU, recalls seeing her now-girlfriend, Esmé, post an affectionate subtweet. It was a message to a friend wondering, “if hot lesbian oomf [one of my followers] of mine is single now or just poly and partnered and having a depressive moment.” Uzman had a hunch that oomf was her.
“I proceeded to DM her asking if she wanted to hang out with me for New Year’s Eve since she was planning to be in New York,” Uzman wrote in an email. “She took a few days to respond (which she said was because she was super nervous), but we proceeded to text each other more and more over the course of the week before NYE. There was definitely a spark online from the start, and we both knew we were destined for more than just an online flirtationship.”
Esmé, 22, goes to school at Harvard, so Uzman greeted her at NYC’s Penn Station with flowers as she arrived in town. They spent the week of New Year’s together and took couple photos and, according to Uzman, the “lesbians of Twitter ate it up.”
It wasn’t super shocking for Uzman to find a significant other on Twitter.
“We both use Twitter on a daily basis as a way to be social and interact with other lesbians online,” Uzman said. “It really wasn’t a big surprise to us that we met on Twitter given how connected the lesbian community is on there, and we think it makes for a better story than meeting on Tinder.”
That’s the great thing about Twitter — you truly can find and talk with your people. Hell, I’ve found a whole community of people obsessed with the same Hawaiian shirt.
But what now, with Twitter breaking all the time, and getting stranger, and frankly, getting worse? For every sweet love there, there are countless instances of harassment and unwanted sexual messages. Twitter’s always been a platform where the good mixes with the absolute worst humanity has to offer. It’s not getting any better.
For people who met their partners on Twitter, it can be kind of weird to see the place morph over time. Garland says she uses Twitter less these days but still checks in every once in a while. But the site does hold good memories.
“There are so many DMs I would hate to lose if the whole thing shut down,” Garland said. “So much of that cheesy early relationship romance was in those DMs.”
Grant, meanwhile, says she and her husband don’t always immediately share they met on Twitter because some people might not get it. But if you’ve ever been a dedicated user of Twitter, it makes sense.
“I think it proved the point that by just being somewhere and sharing about yourself, you might have someone else raise their hand and say, ‘Oh, hey, I want to be friends or, you know, something more than that,” Grant said. “It’s had to explain that to someone who doesn’t get Twitter.”
What started as a place to share short, inane thoughts about your lunch or workday became a platform where sometimes people are more genuinely themselves. Twitter is a depository for your thoughts unlike, say, Instagram, which is a place to…fake that you’re always on vacation, I guess? Approaching a stranger at a bar is difficult. DMing someone whose tweets you’ve read for years is much easier. You feel like you know them. There’s a connection, albeit through the foggy lens of social media.
Even if Twitter does die off one day, it’s done its fair share of good even among the lots of bad it’s doled out. Uzman is hoping to soon live in the same city as Esmé after they graduate. Garland has spent eight years in Berlin with her husband, traveling to more than 40 countries together. Grant and her husband planned and worked for years to establish a life where they could run their own businesses and go hiking whenever they liked. It’s a long road from a random tweet more than a decade in the past.
“Our dream was to basically do what we’re doing now,” Grant said. “It took us 10 years to get here.”