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"  Now that we know Uncle Sam is hacking the e-mails and calls coming in to Ask E. Jean, the love lives of those pasty analysts at the NSA ought to be a shade more fascinating. Indeed, the classic wormhole for tracking sexual, professional, and cultural changes in America is, weirdly, the advice column. (Read the 14 years of Dan Savage&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Savage Love&amp;quot; to see what I mean.) Hand on my left bra strap, I swear to you that the Ask Eeee letters are such a direct beam into the soul of the American woman, I sometimes think we are running a secret government project. Where else could one receive the first warnings that anyone worth &amp;quot;liking&amp;quot; on Facebook would also turn out to be extremely irritating? The letters heralded the surge of porn and forecast the overprescribing of antidepressants. (And if there&amp;#039;s not a connection between the two, I&amp;#039;ll drink a bottle of Jenna Jameson&amp;#039;s self-tanner.) But it was with the new ways of wooing that the letters really showed their stuff. It seemed as if the correspondents were looking deep into the crystal balls of their romantic lives and foretelling the stunning technological advances of Silicon Valley (and Silicon Alley). Not since the first lady hominid climbed out of that tree in paradise and enjoyed her first eight lovers, all in one day, has there been such a merry revolution. Here&amp;#039;s a time line that will help us see how fresh ways of falling in love and the rise of technology go hand in hand. THE EVOLUTION OF WOOING, 1993\u20132013 1993: The world is a cold, heartless place, where, according to the letters, you actually meet and are rejected by chaps in person. 1994: A thing appears on your new office computer that says: &amp;quot;Meet me for coffee.&amp;quot; That thing is an e-mail, and the poetry of its four words\u2014the magic of them!\u2014opens your life forever to the wonder of words on a screen. 1995: Match.com goes live, and you bravely create a profile saying you are looking for a nice guy &amp;quot;with a sense of humor&amp;quot; and receive 1,270 responses. In the first hour. 1996: Best to gloss over the time you visited that chat room. 1997: Wi-Fi is invented, making it possible for you to meet your future second husband at Starbucks in 2009. 1998: You learn the hard way that the more you google a fella you &amp;quot;might be interested in,&amp;quot; the creepier you feel, and the creepier you feel, the pickier you grow, until finally, with the exception of JFK Jr., there&amp;#039;s not a man remaining in America you&amp;#039;d consider going out with. 2001: Auntie Eeee and her sister, Cande, solve the online-dating &amp;quot;cad, wanker, and brainless nincompoop&amp;quot; issue by launching GreatBoyfriends.com, where women recommend their ex-boyfriends to one another. Oprah says it&amp;#039;s the best idea she&amp;#039;s ever heard. 2003: You are courted on MySpace by the lead singer of a band. It is tender. It is sweet. When you fly to see him perform at a Fort Wayne, Indiana, softball field, you discover he&amp;#039;s 15. 2004: Mark Zuckerberg est arriv\u00E9. You really gotta love the little bastard. 2005: You excitedly upload to YouTube a video of you salsa dancing with a semifamous reality-show contestant, but since it&amp;#039;s an interminable four minutes long, nobody watches it. 2006: As Twitter debuts, eventually dooming dictators around the world, you stage a coup d&amp;#039;\u00E9tat of someone&amp;#039;s heart with these three simple steps: (1) You follow the attractive person on Twitter; (2) you retweet two or three of the attractive person&amp;#039;s tweets; and (3) you reply to one of his/her tweets with a lusty zinger. (How not to flirt: See Wikipedia, Anthony Weiner.) 2007: You squeal in the grip of the greatest ecstasy woman has ever known when you turn on your first iPhone. 2010: You discover that a tryst with your boyfriend is twice as hot when you&amp;#039;re Skyping with him while on a business trip as when he&amp;#039;s in your actual bed. 2013: Words are dead. You&amp;#039;re now back in the Lascaux Cave, communicating with images via Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat\u2014and your love life is totally happening on Tinder. Well, well. I see that I didn&amp;#039;t manage to squeeze in other location-based apps, such as Foursquare, HowAboutWe, Blendr, and so on, but it&amp;#039;s too late now. Miss Amy Gross, Miss Elaina Richardson, Miss Pat Towers, Miss Jen Weisel, Miss Alex Postman, Miss Candice Rainey\u2014all beloved ELLE and Ask Eeee editors from years past\u2014and the brilliant Miss Lisa Chase, adored present editor (it was Lisa who put the Weiner in the bun of this column), will not permit a missed deadline. It&amp;#039;s time for...the list.  Here&amp;#039;s one message that&amp;#039;s been coming through in the letters for two decades: The more we depend on our electronics, the hungrier we grow for the human touch. Therefore it&amp;#039;s only right that we begin with the most revolutionary development. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/ask-e-jean/q-and-a/a13757/e-jean-20-years-dating/>