Today Peter took off work early as did I to meet Beth from the local newspaper to interview us as one of the couples in the area that met online. Her main focus was on couples who met on sites like Match.com and others yet Peter and I have a different story. Over an hour of talking and being interviewed and we glazed over things. I won't even attempt to go into as much detail here to save you all from tired eyes.
Peter lived in Owensboro, KY (where we currently reside) and I lived with my parents in Springfield, OR. Around 1996 Peter and I met each other on a MUSH which was a text only roleplay site. Think of like a chat room where you pretend to be wizards and vampires and such and each person helps tell the story of what is going on like chapters in a book. We gamed with each other for several years and after a time started talking out of character on the site. In 1999 Peter was sleeping on his friends couch, unemployed and depressed. I was just about to turn 18 and I asked him to come spend a week at my parents house with me (with my parents okay of course). Peter's friends knew he had to get up and out and they put him on a greyhound in March and we spent a week together in Oregon with many different stories springing from there that I could spend hours talking about. Neither of us went in expecting a relationship but after that week we constantly talked on the phone (which would later bite us as he racked up a $400 bill with AT&T). In April he asked me to marry him over the phone. We had many adventures after that as we moved to Arizona and then back to Oregon and fumbled through this relationship. We bought our rings at an after Christmas sale in the mall and a few months later (yes I didn't find out until well along - long explanation) we found out I had gotten pregnant with our first so we pushed the wedding date up.
We've had our ups and downs over the years but there are a few things that I appreciate about how we met and the main one is that it was never a relationship based off of looks but pure personality and the building of trust.
This past summer I went to my cousins wedding and got to talk to my parents and found out how they met in college and got to hear the awkward story of how that all unfolded. I'm so glad that I got to hear it though and I sometimes think it's a topic we don't think about talking about often but it is perhaps one of the most amazing things in life to realize sometimes how by chance it can be or how slow or fast it can all come about.
I'd love to hear more 'how we met' stories from people. I think sometimes we realize how amazing our relationships are but we forget just how spectacular of a chance we were given in the first place.
What a great story! I was expecting an on-line dating story and yours has such an expected twist in that you met through a gaming site. I actually tripped over my husband's feet in a bar (I wasn't intoxicated when I did it, I'm just a klutz). I had barely graduated college and was still living at home. Turned out he was 8 years older than me but we still dated briefly until he broke my heart by reconciling with his ex-girlfriend. Two years later I started dating someone who reminded me a bit of him and when that didn't work out, I picked up the phone because I wanted to know if things had worked out between him and his girlfriend (I needed better closure I suppose--I'm that person who will watch the worst movie to the end just to know). It turned out things hadn't worked out between them, we went out that night, and now next week is our 15 year wedding anniversary. That was the short version. :)
ReplyDeleteThat is such a great story! To think had you not picked up that phone things would have been so different! And happy early anniversary!
Delete