FOR several years I had a problem unusual among Internet geeks: I had too much success with women. I used the Internet as a means of communication with women I had already met offline in order to overcome my social awkwardness and forge romantic relationships.

Sounds healthy? It wasn’t.

It started in my sophomore year in high school. I went to one of those big Eastern public schools that pumps out students in a way that would make 19th-century industrialists throw their top hats into the air and shout “Huzzah!” Even we students thought of ourselves as a faceless mob of subproletarians waiting for the next episode of “American Idol” to take away the pain of our meaningless existence.

I was at the bottom of the barrel: a plump, silent, painfully awkward dweeb who clung to his Latin textbook as if it held the secrets to existence. The only good thing that happened to me that year was meeting Chelsea.

We talked for maybe 5 minutes about video games between classes, and of that time I spent 4 minutes and 59 seconds dripping in nervous sweat and trying to swallow my stutter. Whenever I tried to say something charming, my sentence drooped off with an invisible ellipsis. My words of wit fell flat, and my skillful cultural allusions deteriorated into a stream of loosely associated quotations from “Star Trek.”