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I don't know how much wine I'd had when I offered to marry Nathan, an American living in Berlin whom I had never met. The time stamp on our Facebook chat history says my proposal occurred at 7.23pm one Friday in January, so hopefully not too much. The (non-serious) offer of marriage was friendly rather than romantic: Nathan and I have a similar sense of humour and marrying me would allow him to remain in the EU without having to navigate the complicated bureaucracy of German visa applications. He politely declined.

True, we'd never met in real life, but that has never been much of a problem for me. Most of the new friends I have made in the past two years, since moving to London, I have initially encountered online.