Why Casual Kiss Exists
It’s 2003. I’m working third shift — graveyard hours, the kind where the internet feels like the only thing still awake with you.
Di’s across the world in Australia. Fourteen hours apart, which should have made it functionally impossible for two people to ever cross paths.
Except our hours matched up. Her daylight, my dark, both of us online at the same strange overlapping moment — and that’s where Casual Kiss comes in.
This was the site. CasualKiss.com — also known back then as WantToMeetMe.com, which is how Di actually found it. No algorithm matched us. No app pinged either of us with a notification. We just were both there, at the same time, looking.
Twenty-three years later, we’re married.
The original site is gone now — squatted, abandoned, swallowed by whatever the internet does to the things it leaves behind. We bought the name back. Not just for nostalgia, though there’s plenty of that too — but because what was true in 2003 is still true now: people don’t need to be optimized at. They need a place to actually show up, without a feed deciding what they see or an algorithm deciding who they meet.
That’s what we’re trying to build again. No swiping until your thumb goes numb. No app fighting for your attention between texts and TikTok. Just a place you choose to come to, on purpose — the way Di and I did, half a world apart, wide awake at the wrong hour, and somehow exactly on time.
The Team
CK, our mascot. A friendly half Australian, half American Quokka!
Di, the motivation for all things. True blue Aussie, with a hell of a right hook.
Brad. The brains without a face. Typical American middle aged dad. Go Oilers!