ShareThisSean Eldridge wasn't on Facebook yet that fall of 2005.
He had never signed up for Myspace, or even tried its forerunner, Friendster. Then living in Cambridge, Mass., Eldridge was completely unconnected to the emerging world of online social networking.
His status changed after a blind date that November with a co-founder of Facebook, a Harvard student named Chris Hughes who would later be portrayed in the Academy Award-winning movie "The Social Network." The two openly gay young men hit it off, and soon entered a relationship that has spanned 5-1/2 years and culminated with a marriage-engagement announcement in January in the couple's New York City home.
Over the course of their brunch date, Eldridge learned of Hughes' roles as spokesman and sounding board for Facebook, which was created in his dorm-room suite. Hughes was the former roommate of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive officer, who had dropped out of Harvard a year earlier to develop the site full-time in Palo Alto, Calif.
Today, Facebook has more than 600 million users in more than 190 countries and is valued as a company at $50 billion. Zuckerberg is considered the world's youngest self-made billionaire, and ranked 35th on Forbes' annual list of richest Americans. His net worth was estimated last year at $6.9 billion.
Hughes, 27, also played a role in Barack Obama's presidential campaign. He is estimated to be worth many millions of dollars through his ownership stake and stock options.
The New York Post recently speculated his worth at more than $500 million.
Hughes wasn't yet a millionaire the day that Eldridge met him.
"Meeting him was just like meeting any other student, though with this side job that was Facebook," Eldridge said in a phone interview from New York, where the couple hope to marry in 2012. "We very quickly fell in love."
Life has changed dramatically for Eldredge since that brunch date: He has worked in Silicon Valley, hung out with multimillionaires, dined at the White House, attended two Ivy League schools, organized the student movement around Obama's 2008 campaign and currently holds a nationally visible position with a leading advocacy group for same-sex marriage.
All that by age 24. He is also now on Facebook -- "I literally joined the day I met Chris."
The son of two doctors, Steve Eldridge and Sarah Eldridge, Sean Eldridge was not publicly out about his sexuality during his years at Ottawa Hills (Ohio) High School, where he was involved in theater, ran varsity track and graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. He was also a youth-committee representative for the city of Toledo's Board of Community Relations.
"Growing up, I really didn't see out people, so it just didn't seem like an option," he said. "There were no out students or out faculty or real out adults that I knew growing up in Ottawa Hills and Toledo."
Eldridge said he came out as gay during his first year at Deep Springs College, a small, prestigious all-male, two-year college in rural California where students balance liberal-arts studies with farm chores. Many students later transfer to Ivy League colleges, and Eldridge went on to Brown University in Providence, R.I.
But first he moved to the Boston area and took a break to gain work experience. A former Deep Springs classmate, then a Harvard student, suggested that he and Hughes meet.
"From that first real date on, we became a pretty serious couple pretty quickly," Eldridge said.
In "The Social Network" Hughes is played by actor Patrick Mapel. The Hughes character has few speaking lines but is present in dorm-room scenes. In real life, Hughes was the second Facebook user after Zuckerberg. Eldridge, who spent time at the Palo Alto Facebook headquarters portrayed in the film, says the script contains much fiction.
"I know Mark, I know Dustin (Moskovitz, another co-founder), I know Chris, and through them I have a very good idea of what happened," Eldridge said. "It was all a lot more boring than that. The film was what I would say what most Hollywood films are: it was a good story, and it was a fictional story."
The men have lived in New York since Eldridge graduated from Brown in spring of 2009.
Last fall, Hughes launched his own nonprofit Internet startup, Jumo, a social network for social activism that aims to connect people with philanthropic causes.
Eldridge left Columbia University's law school last winter to devote himself full-time to the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. He joined the growing staff of Freedom to Marry, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by civil-rights attorney Evan Wolfson.
Gay marriage is legal in only five states and the District of Columbia.
Eldridge and Hughes are hoping that New York law will change in time for their wedding, set for sometime in 2012.
(Contact JC Reindl at jcreindl(at)theblade.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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