I talk quite a bit about using facebook to find romance (in How To Start Dating And Stop Waiting) but does the same apply to that other social media giant? Is it possible to find love… on twitter? Writer Helen Hunt thinks so. It snuck up on her when she wasn’t even looking.
“I should probably start by saying that I wasn’t actually looking for love on Twitter. I’d been divorced for nearly ten years, I had my own house and four cats. Yes, four. Yes, I know … And I genuinely thought that was it; that was all that life had to offer.
As a writer, I mainly saw Twitter as a place to talk to other writers and gossip with my friends. I had no idea that it would spark a train of events that would lead to me swapping my single lifestyle for the life I have now, living with my partner and his three sons. (And still four cats.)
Back in November of 2011 I started chatting on Twitter to crime novelist Mike Walters. As with so many connections I’ve made on Twitter, I can’t exactly remember how it started. I suspect we were both chatting to other people in the writing world, and somehow our Twitter social circles and our conversations overlapped.
We started out by talking about writing. He was intrigued by my short story writing because it’s a form he’s never tried, and I was interested in his crime writing as that’s the genre I like to read. Then, as time went on, we started talking about more personal things and we realised we had a lot in common. We have similar political views and outlooks on life, and we realised that at various points in our lives we’d lived in the same places as each other.
I found out he was a widower and single parent to three kids. He found out I was single with four cats, but, amazingly, this didn’t put him off. Slowly the public timeline chatting drifted into private DM chatting and that’s when we decided to meet up.
When I mentioned that I had never been to Manchester, which is where one of Mike’s books is set, he offered to give me the official ‘Trust No One’ guided tour. I have to say, I’m still waiting for my guided tour, but we did meet up and we’ve never looked back since.
We first met ‘in real life’ in February of 2012. We took things fairly slowly at first, because of the children, but we moved in together in September 2013 and are now planning to get married.
It seems odd to talk about being attracted to someone on Twitter when you only have their words to go on, but for me I think it was the perfect way to start a relationship. After all, the way someone thinks about life and the words they use to communicate are so much more important than anything else about them.
I realised there was something special about Mike really early on in our Twitter communication, and everything else since then has just been a journey to prove that I was right.”
The moral of this story? Keep your eyes open because you never know where Mr or Ms Right might be lurking.
Helen writes short stories and features for the likes of Woman’s Weekly, My Weekly, The Weekly News, Best, Yours, The People’s Friend, Prima, This England… to name but a few. She tweets under the handle @hmhunt, and you can find out more about Helen on her website www.helenmhunt.co.uk
How To Start Dating And Stop Waiting is available from amazon or order it via your favourite bookstore.
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