The Xennial Curse: Love in the Time of Dial-Up

We are the in-between ones.

Too young to be Gen X, too analog to be Millennials. They call us Xennials, but that label doesn’t capture the ache of remembering life before the internet and being forced to date after it broke everything.

We rode our bikes without helmets to meet friends whose parents we never met. We knocked on doors, waited on porches, learned to read a house by the sound coming through the walls. Our first crushes developed not from filtered selfies or curated bios, but from the way someone passed notes in class or how their voice cracked in a late-night AIM chat.

We grew up during that sliver of time where you could still disappear into something real. Where your worth wasn’t based on your looks, your algorithm, or how well you could package yourself in a swipeable format.

Our early internet was pure chaos and connection: AOL chatrooms, ICQ, IRC, GeoCities, BBS boards blinking green on black. We weren’t just profiles. We were people, made of pixels and patience. We learned to flirt in plaintext. To fall in love through words.

We talked for hours before we ever traded photos. Some of us didn’t even have photos! We had webcams the size of baseballs that refreshed every seven seconds like stop-motion ghosts. But still, we connected. Not through filters or bios, but through mixtapes and typing quirks and the way someone spelled “definitely.”

And for a while, it worked. We met people in chat rooms, made plans on AIM, went to the mall just to sit in the food court and be nervous together. Nobody judged you for your off-brand shoes or your thrifted hoodie. If you were kind, funny, curious? That was enough.

Then came Web 2.0.

Like a tsunami made of likes and image compression, it washed over us. Suddenly, the internet wasn’t a secret hideout. It was a storefront window. Everyone was posing. Everyone was branding. Everyone had become their own PR department. Dating apps didn’t just ask who you were. They demanded to see who you could sell.

And Xennials? We weren’t built for that.

We weren’t raised to pitch ourselves in a carousel of curated thirst traps. We weren’t trained to swipe through people like clearance racks. We missed the onboarding for the new love economy. We were still trying to write each other letters in a world that had replaced mailboxes with match percentages.

So now we’re adrift.

Too old for the dopamine loops of Tinder. Too young to fully retreat into a landline and a folded yearbook message. We’re swiping with broken compasses, still hoping to find someone who remembers the hum of a CRT monitor warming up or what it felt like to get kicked offline because your mom had to use the phone.

We came of age in the last moment before the world decided your value was visual. Before “hot” became a currency and vulnerability got replaced with vibe checks. We remember love before it was gamified.

And we miss it. God, do we miss it.

I will always grieve the screech of that 56k handshake. Painful, mechanical, holy. Because it meant you were about to connect. Not just to the internet, but to someone. Someone who wanted to know you.

Now connection is instant, constant, and often empty.

We are the Xennials. Raised in the analog, betrayed by the digital. We were the last ones to love without a profile pic.

And I don’t know if we’ll ever truly recover from that loss.