A Love Story

Since I'm getting a lot of hits from my husband's post on IMAO about dating, I thought I'd share this with the curious.

This is how I found him.

I liked the poem, and, since I posted quite a bit on rec.arts.poems back in the day, I ran across this poem a few days after it was posted. (The day I found it happened to be Brian's 25th birthday). I saw the stlbrianj@aol.com (now defunct, btw - so go ahead and spam it), and I sent him an e-mail asking about reading poetry in St. Louis, something in which I was interested at the time. I signed it hli, my initials at the time. The e-mail address from which it originated was c674496@missouri.edu, so it was hardly a pick-up e-mail, not divulging my gender.

And he wrote back! It was a nice, witty, lengthy piece answering exactly what I asked. And I wrote back a thank you, and, well, you get the picture.

He printed and saved all of these e-mails.

We were friends. And then we were more, and then we married on May 22, 1999.

So, there it is. Not Internet dating on purpose, but certainly a good story with a happy ending. We lived in our separate cities for just over a year after beginning dating, and eventually we decided it'd be best for me to move from Columbia, MO to St. Louis because the job opportunities were much greater. During that year in separate cities, though, Brian was working in O'Fallon, MO as a printer, and this was on the way to Columbia. So, on Wednesdays, he'd pop into town and we'd spend some time together. I fixed him lunch for the next day and made rhubarb pies (my favorite - so selfish) and left napkins with little love notes in his lunch.

He saved these.

Anecdotal: I have a spouse who can beat me at Scrabble pretty handily. (We keep all of our scores...how...geeky!). I believe his high score is over 500, and mine a paltry 470 or some such (not the same game). If ever I need to restore my self-esteem from a Scrabble beating, well, there's always Boggle.

Where he doesn't stand a chance. Buhahahahah.

hln

Posted by hln at July 7, 2003 09:58 AM | Blogspot Blog