He looked like he was in his early forties, and had a calmer, more relaxed vibe than I was expecting. Nice to meet you,” he said as he sat down in front of me, cool and collected. I come here a lot; they do very good cheesecake.
Would you like to try some? Go on, it really is delicious—let me treat you to a piece.” It was an occasion worth commemorating. My encounter with Tsuchiya, my very first PerfectStrangers match.
After I’d registered my profile on PerfectStrangers, I perused the site until I understood how it worked. It looked like there were two ways to meet someone. You set a time and approximate location (say, 5pm on such and such a day, in Shibuya), added a short comment (“Looking forward to a great chat!”), and then posted it on the site.
This was known as “listing a chat.” Logged-in users could view these listings on a notice board, and if they wanted to meet you, they could reply to your post by clicking “Respond.” If you received multiple responses, you sifted through them and picked the person you most wanted to meet. If you didn’t feel like meeting any of them, you could decline them all and cancel the listing. And if you didn’t get any responses, of course, your meeting would just fall through.
So in order to meet someone, you had to either list a chat and wait for someone to respond, or respond to someone else’s listing. I felt a bit like I was being pushed into it, but then again, there was no point just staring at the site forever. This guy seemed all right, so why not meet up with him just to try it out?
Just making a profile wasn’t enough to set things in motion. The more I browsed the site, the more I understood that, unlike Facebook or Twitter, there was no fun in just browsing. All you could really do was “like” the intriguing people at the top of the popularity rankings, or go through and tag all your interests—#reading, #travel, and so on—and then check out people with the same tags as you.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
