A look into the GChat and email history of a world-traveling college student and her hitchhiker boyfriend reveals the ups and downs of their long-distance love.
Illustration by Chris Ritter for BuzzFeed
Chat histories have become the modern version of a cache of yellowed love letters, a record of relationships that endured or went awry. In Love in the Time of GChat, couples show us the online exchanges that punctuated their time together.
The Beginning
One day in September in 2009, two hitchhikers infiltrated Erica's University of Wisconsin dorm room. Her roommate (who was a little off-kilter) apparently thought picking up hitchhikers was an altruistic thing to do. Erica, an RA in this dorm, was a good girl at heart but also had a punk rock flavor (she wore polka-dotted dresses and streaked her naturally blond bob with Manic Panic hair dye). While she should have thrown these hitchhiker guys out, she had the hots for one. His name was James. He had brown eyes. He wore black jeans, Converse sneakers, and a cigarette behind his ear. He was cool. She loved when he picked up her guitar and started playing. That night, they ended up kissing. Afterward James went back to his life of hitchhiking and waiting tables in Michigan. While he was quiet in person, James started drunk-dialing Erica from the road most nights. She would stay up waiting on him. She would woo him. They started G-chatting when he had access to public libraries or friends’ computers.
