Nearly three years ago, an email arrived via LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a social networking website. Unlike Facebook, the main purpose of LinkedIn is not social. It’s business. It has since become the hottest website for job seekers and for professionals in general. It’s like having a business card and a resume online. Recently, I even offered someone a pretty good paying job because he had the prescience to connect with me via Linkedin.

Back in spring 2010, the email was telling me Neil was seeking contact.

Neil was one of the few people I dated who ended up not a friend. That was because the relationship ended badly. Or rather it just ended messy. I guess he’s not a true sip and go because I did see him after our initial date. But that’s just semantics.


We worked together at a restaurant in the mid 1990s. We both had good senses of humor and we loved using big vocabulary words.

My mother Ann remembers him as the guy who stumbled after standing up from the couch in the living room the night he came to pick me up for our dinner date and said, “Oops. First day with the new feet.”

Neil and I dated over the summer but it mostly consisted of seeing each other at work and watching TV in a sweltering condo where he crashed sometimes.

Neil was very smart and very clever. He was 26-years-old but not happy with where he was in life. He tried to get into training for our restaurant chain, but that wasn’t really where his passion rested. I knew he was bound for something different and more intellectually challenging.

By the end of the summer, our relationship was foundering. I had started working at a TV station and was more focused on the people there, frankly. Plus, Neil became more distant. He wouldn’t take my calls. He wouldn’t answer the door. Eventually, I heard from a mutual friend that Neil had hooked up with a server at another restaurant. Then Neil just seemed to vanish.

I saw Neil two more times in my life: a former coworker’s funeral and at another restaurant where he was working years later. But we didn’t keep in touch.

Now, I was receiving a LinkedIn message from him 15 years after he melted from my life.

I accepted him as a connection.

Neil had been busy since I saw him last. He attended law school, passed the bar exam, and was working with the largest law firm in my previous city. He volunteered with high school debate students. The month he contacted me, he was getting married to a woman he had met online.

“Yeah it was pretty amazing,” he said. “We worked in the same building at the time, exactly one floor apart. And we met online. How weird is that?”

We’ve never talked about our restaurant days together. We don’t need to.