Dawn Bird, 37, project manager, customer science I’ve always been quirky, so none of my friends was surprised when I met my partner on a sci-fi dating site. I lasted only four days on the site because of the influx of messages I got. Some were really stupid or weird, and I just thought, this is not for me.
One time I came home and found Jon had covered the entire hallway in little love notes
Jon contacted me on the second day and I liked him because his email seemed genuine. We talked a little about sci-fi, and I told him I had a manual for the Millennium Falcon. Obviously there’s a Star Wars/Star Trek rivalry, so that started a bit of a riot, but he was so passionate about Trek, it made me think: this is an interesting guy. He wasn’t asking me about how I look; there was a genuine connection over something we had in common. Our first call lasted two and a half hours.
For me, romance is connection. He also made me two stop-motion videos with Jelly Babies: one is the story of how we met, the other he made when we were stressed about wedding preparations, saying that we’re still together and in the end we’ll be married. In the video, we walk up the aisle and the Starship Enterprise crashes into the congregation. The two Jelly Babies are still on our mantelpiece, next to our phaser.
Jonathan Bird, 35, managing director I set up TrekDating on my birthday in 2013. It started as UK only; now it’s in the US, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada and Australia, with close to 2.5 million users. Dawn and I were just two people in that bunch.
I joined to make sure things were working properly. Dawn joined as her first foray into online dating, and was on it for a total of four days. I was lucky to catch her. We talked online for less than a week before we met in person. We had a phone call first – I do that as a rule, because if you don’t like their voice, the date will be the worst two hours of your life. We arranged a second date the following weekend, but then we were too excited, so we did https://datingranking.net/polish-dating/ something midweek. After date three, everything just fell into place.
At our wedding we had a 2ft Lego Starship Enterprise on our sweets table. The tables were named after Star Trek ships and places we’d dated; during the wedding breakfast we heard various orchestral pieces from sci-fi films.
Isabella Pourtaheri, 30, HR business partner I read on Twitter about a new app called that matches people according to their music tastes, and I said, why not?
I’m not as big a fan of Star Trek as Jon is – I don’t speak Klingon – but I love sci-fi in general
You can see the person’s profile, and next to it is a volume dial; if you have a lot of artists and songs in common (in your Spotify playlists) the volume is full; if it’s just a few it is lower. I think Daniel and I had four out of five bars. I saw his picture and thought he was very cute. Thinking I wouldn’t get a response, I sent him a brief and cool message (looking at it now, it’s embarrassing). Daniel has cute dimples, so I wrote: “Dimples for the win. Automatic advantage over other contenders. And how are you this fine, ominous, drizzly day?” Luckily he responded, and we were pen pals for about a month.