“People fundamentally have a lot of shame around hooking up,” explains digital developer and entrepreneur Carl Sandler. “We live in a culture that teaches us that to hook up with someone is bad.”

Recently, it occurred to me while I was fishing YouTube’s streams for information on clamshell lighting and Clone Wars trivia that, maybe, the video-sharing site held answers to bigger questions—questions about relationships, sex, and sexuality.

This is the paragraph I completed before my mother died:

Welcome to All This Nothing, a new column on Gawker Review of Books that explores how we talk, text, and write about love, loss, and desire in the digital age.