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I t happens. I've seen it.

Years ago, two neighbors in my small apartment complex were both engaged to men they met on the Internet. One was a single mother who never left the house. As it turned out, she didn't need to.

The other was a reclusive artist who met another reclusive artist in a chat room.

They fell in love and moved to Denver, where everyone moves to live happily ever after.

Which is just to say, I've seen people looking for love in weird places, but this year seemed different.

This was the year of game-show love.

It was the year of "The Bachelor" and "Average Joe" and a few less memorable, but similar boy meets girl, boy meets another girl, boy meets 23 more girls. Girls meet boy.

Boy rejects 24 girls. One girl gets boy. Ah, love.

For all of us to watch, it was a traditional but twisted way of finding romance. There were actual dates (that endangered species) and meeting the parents, all leading up to marriage. Or at least an engagement and a cover spread in People magazine.

It was the year when men and women confused lights and cameras and ABC's deep, dream-date wallet for love.

For those who didn't make the auditions, this was also the year of online romance -- not the chat room kind, but the $40 personality profile kind administered by a Web site matchmaker. Commercials and pop-up windows advertised the click and drag avenue to your soul mate.

This also was the year of a popular new trend called "speed dating," where 10 men and 10 women have five-minute "dates" and then ask for the phone numbers of the people they liked best.

It was the year when people played for love the way they play any other odds game. They gave out phone numbers the way you put coins in a slot machine.

But more than finding love, most people were watching it on television.

This was the year when all the women on "Sex and the City" found love just before they turned 40 and weeks before the season finale. And after all those years, everyone on the cast of "Friends" found someone. Well, almost everyone.

As the headlines marched along the bottom of the screen -- Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan -- the collective subconscious was having an "I'm all alone" panic attack.

Our parents met in college and married soon after, but for my generation, 22 was too young to pair off.

There were places to see and careers to begin. Then we would marry. But more time passed than anyone planned, and bars are no place to meet someone, office romance is no romance at all and pepper spray seems the best thing for the guy who tries to pick you up at the grocery store.