Love in a Knot – The Weird Side of the Internet

Love in a Knot – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

It’s hard to put yourself out there on the dating scene. I’ve been a bachelor for a long time that I’ve exhausted the conventional assortment of common excuses and into the uncommon excuses. Currently I believe I’m single because I was switched in the maternity ward with an extra-terrestrial child, the kind that can pass for human but has grown up with no game whatsoever. I’m not really booing about this, because each day I see one of you bitching about your relationship so hard I feel like The Flash dodging all these bullets.

But I’m a romantic at heart in the same way a couch-bound NASCAR fan is Dale Earnheart Jr. at heart. Or whatever, I’m not into NASCAR. I am into novelty though, so when love meets novelty on the corner, I’m there.

In Eutin, Germany, we find what’s known as the “Bridegroom’s Oak,” or Bräutigamseiche. It is a five-hundred-year oak with a special place, and a special function. In the 1800s, a pair of star-crossed lovers, whose affection was blocked by the woman’s father, exchanged letters in the oak’s knothole, using a ladder because it was ten foot up. They wed in 1892, and ever since, people have been leaving notes in the knothole, hoping that someone going to the tree would answer them. So the tree gets like 50-60 messages a month, and the postal person delivers them. The tree has its own postal code.

Of course, the address: Bräutigamseiche, Dodauer Forest, 23701 Eutin, Germany. I’m definitely doing this. I imagine its mostly German people answering them, but in my position, the language barrier is probably better than the intergalactic barrier I’ve been entertaining. See? Novelty. I think we need a tree like this in the U.S. Or, if your posts mean anything at all, maybe we need a shiny, 500-year old dumpster with its own ZIP Code.

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