MSN Messenger of love helped emo teens get it together

Geordie Gray was shy, but who needs Cupid when you have MSN Messenger on your side in pursuing love?

Frontman hair: All Time Low lead singer Alex Gaskarth performs in 2009. Picture: Getty Images

4 min read

12:00AMJanuary 03, 2023.

Updated 8:53AMJanuary 03, 2023

If we’re to believe Wikipedia, my first love has a net worth of $25m. He got married last year, which I found out in a People Magazine exclusive. He also bought a house – this I learned through the Los Angeles Times. It has eight bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, a swimming pool, fire pit and an outdoor kitchen.

The cold tap in the bathroom of my rented studio apartment hasn’t worked in two years and my real estate agent is missing in action. Which is fine; the building I live in is original art deco, so all occupational health and safety issues can be framed as “quirks” and “charms”. Besides, his house has the grey hardwood floors you’d see in the McMansions of rapidly developed suburbs. Who’s the real loser?

I’m talking about my first boyfriend. He was in the year above me, and was emo years after it was a la mode. His complexion was ghostly pale, like Robert Smith from the Cure, and he wore his highlighted hair in a permanent swoop. He was also in a band, which was catnip for a girl on the angstier side of teendom.

I was not my boyfriend’s first choice. I wasn’t particularly beastly, it’s just that, well, Morrissey had it right when he said: “I am the son, and the heir, of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.” My teens were spent in monastic silence, with a lisp that didn’t help the cause.

His first choice was Liberty, a girl I sat with on the bus every morning. She had the upper hand because she was new to the school – ergo, more interesting. She was also very pretty, doe-like, with fantastic tar-black eyes.

I was desperate to sabotage their relationship but Mum drilled “karmic debt” and “the law of attraction” into my malleable skull (a teen spin-off of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret was a stocking filler one Christmas), so meddling with their romance was out of the question lest I be struck down in my next life. As it happens, good old karma was on my side and they broke up a month later.

Robert Smith from The Cure.

It was my turn. I’d strike while the iron was hot, lay my finest skills of seduction on thick, stay as quiet as a church mouse and do absolutely nothing while he went on to date another girl, Leilani.

At this point I realised I would never have the chutzpah to actually talk to my crush in real life and there was only one arena for our love to blossom: MSN Messenger.

Starting a conversation was unthinkable, so I became a keen observer. Every day after school I’d take mental notes of the lyrics he shared to his status update. He was into pop punk. So, within weeks, I was a dedicated student of the music by Baltimore pop punk band All Time Low. Who are garbage by the way, garbage I devoured like gospel.

One afternoon, feeling ballsy, I updated my status to a lyric from one of their earlier EPs (proof that I was an auteur) to bait a conversation: “Your love is the barrel of a gun/So tell me, am I on the right end.”

…

“u like atl?”

…

By some miracle it worked.

From that small exchange, we spent the next several weeks building up an elaborate and exhilarating dialogue on all things music. He was still dating Leilani, so our conversations were a lot of innocuous song swapping and dissecting obscene Blink-182 lyrics. We would message for hours, from night through to the early morning. A ritual that would lead me to habitually falling asleep during class and flunking out of every subject.

One night Dad caught me in the MSN act. It was past bedtime and the glow of my laptop screen bouncing off the skylights ratted me out. I was so embarrassed about talking to a boy that I slammed my screen shut and refused to tell him what I was up to. Dad wasn’t having it. He dragged me by my hair, clutching my apple green Dell for dear life, down the staircase and to my mother. I had to sit there, in anguish, while they sifted through my humiliation. To this day they bring up those messages.

Whatever, it was worth it. He and Leilani broke up and weeks later, over MSN, he asked me to be his girlfriend. Despite talking online for months, we’d never said a word to each other in real life. This didn’t change when we first started dating. I was still too shy to talk to him at school and would take to hiding when I saw him coming in my direction.

I eventually overcame my shyness and had my first extraordinary teenage relationship. There was lots of snogging at the cinemas during Transformers 3 and sneaking into the bushes at the school disco. It was spectacular, exhilarating and short-lived.

His band was taking off and he was dropping out of school to study music at TAFE. A move that, miraculously, panned out for him – he’s never worked a regular job.

So we broke up and he left me with a parting gift: a burnt CD copy of the new, leaked, All Time Low album, complete with DIY artwork.

Geordie Gray is a digital producer and reporter at The OZ.

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MSN Messenger of love helped emo teens get it together

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