A Lonely 26-Year-Old Professor Found Her Husband Through Text-Only Ads in 1992

When Lisa Feldman Barrett, a scientist then starting her career, called Dan on a Saturday in 1992, a woman answered.

Barrett, then about 26 and divorced and in her first job as an assistant professor at Penn State University, had been trading anonymous text-only messages with Dan. She had called a day early. The voice on the line said, "Oh my God, oh my God, I'm just a friend, I'm just a friend." When Dan got on, he said the woman was just a friend. It was the end of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and people were baking cookies to break the fast. Barrett was charmed.

She was lonely and tried one thing after another to meet someone. Stuck in State College, four hours from Philadelphia, New York, or Washington, she was working long days in the lab. She did not want to date a student or anyone in her department, and she complained to friends until they told her to do something about it.

First she befriended a sushi teacher in town and threw a sushi party with him at a local coffee shop. The idea was to gather all the single men they could find nearby. Barrett wore a crushed velvet burgundy dress. She made new friends and met no one.

Then she tried newspaper personals, then Net News, a pre-web bulletin board where posts and replies were anonymous, delayed by days, and written in plain text with no photos. Men outnumbered women by about 10 to one. After answering a few duds, she wrote her own ad, vetted it with her fellow assistant professors, whom Barrett called her "little Greek chorus," and posted it.

About 80 responses arrived in 24 hours. Barrett printed them all, made a pot of gumbo, and read them with friends over several bottles of wine. Most were earnest and sweet. One couple told her she was their soulmate and invited her to join them as a third partner.

She picked five men to write to, then stopped answering new replies. A week later, another message arrived from Dan. Barrett told him she was done answering new people but that he seemed interesting and could write to her directly. After a pause for her grant applications, they sent about 100 emails across a Thursday and Friday, text only.

Dan suggested talking Sunday night. Barrett had a date that night, so she called Saturday instead, reached the "just a friend" moment, canceled her date, and stayed home to talk to Dan for eight hours. They talked for six hours the next night. Within a week, he flew to State College.

Barrett picked him up at a tiny airport in a cornfield, and the 15-minute drive into town in the dark felt familiar after those long calls. At the end of that first weekend, she proposed they stop seeing other people and give it three months, because a long-distance relationship would not survive local dating on both sides.

On her 30th birthday the next weekend, sitting on a cliff, she told him she felt like she was falling in love with him but must be projecting. For months they joked, "I feel like I'm in love with you." On a freezing weekend in Maine, sitting on a huge rock by the ocean, she felt certain she needed to stay with him.