Our story - part 1

I've been neglecting my blog for the last few months and I apologize. There's just so much going on that I've had a difficult time knowing what to say or where to start. Things are starting to come together now, so I thought I'd start at the beginning which will better explain what's going on now.

This is going to be a long story so instead of boring you to death, I'm going to chop it up into bits and pieces. This is more how I think anyway. Call it ADD blogging if you'd like. :)

In Spring of 2007 I had been single for over a year without anyone even asking me out in the previous year. There had been several guys whom I had met online, but the chemistry just wasn't there. I asked one guy if we were dating and he said he didn't know. I told him I'd make it easy on him, we weren't. My one requirement was that the guy had to call me up, talk to me, and then ask me to go do something. When you've done this a couple of times, it's called "dating." The men I was talking seemed to prefer online interaction. I had enough online friends, I wanted MORE.

Around that time I was involved in a singles Bible study. One Sunday morning only three of us showed up, the teacher, another woman and me. So we decided to postpone the lesson and share what was going on in our lives and pray about decisions we were trying to make. The other woman was considering moving back to Columbus, which she eventually did. I was considering opening up my search criteria on yahoo personals. I wasn't meeting men through church or friends, and I think I had chatted with every single online guy in Dayton that met what I was looking for.

I was thinking about changing the search radius to 500 miles on my internet dating site. What this means is that yahoo personals would take all the things I was looking for in a man and look in cities and states outside of my area. I knew this meant that I may have to move out of Dayton, or even out of Ohio, but I was willing to consider it if it meant finding real love.

After we prayed I felt like I had gotten the green light to look outside of Dayton. If I had to move, I trusted God that it would be taken care of. That afternoon I went home and changed my search from 50 miles to 500 miles. I hit "search" and had hundreds of results. I decided to sit back and see if any fish would bite (now that I was willing to move to where they were).

A few days later yahoo personals emailed me my top matches. The number one match was a guy from Grayson, Kentucky. The write up on his profile was nice - close to his family and friends, taught Sunday School, and had a few hobbies - but what I noticed was his smile and the laughter in his brown eyes. I actually sat there smiling back at him. Oh, I liked this one.

So how a girl does this online dating thing, if she doesn't want to make the first move, she views the guy's profile. He can tell that she viewed his profile and if her picture is appealing, he'll view hers. And sometimes this goes back and forth a few times and then the guy gets the guts to send her a smile/wink/whatever and if she smiles/winks/whatevers back, then he sends a message.

So I viewed this Grayson guy's profile and I waited. Nothing. A week later I get another email from yahoo personals and he's still number one. I viewed his profile again and waited. Still nothing. I viewed his profile a couple more times and still nothing. I was about to give up but decided to change my picture to something a little more flirtatious. This was my last ditch effort to get this guy's attention. If he never saw my profile, he'd never know how fabulous I was and how much he was missing out. So I viewed his profile one last time and waited.

A couple days later I got a message from him. Yay! Finally! Yes, it was the flirty picture that finally got his attention. He explained that he wasn't really interested in dating someone 3 hours away but after reading my profile, he wanted to know more.

After exchanging a few messages we talked on the phone. He had the cutest southern accent, which sometimes was a little difficult to understand. And as he listened, he kept saying "right" but it sounded like "wrought." We made plans to meet the following Sunday in Chillicothe at a Barbecue restaurant we found on the internet. I let my friends know where I was going and asked them to text me 2 hours into the meeting to give me a reason to get out of it if I needed to.

I put on my favorite denim skirt and a pink top and started driving 75 minutes to meet the man who would be my husband less than a year later. :)

Good stopping point, don't you think? I'll pick this up later. Check back in a couple of days and hopefully I'll have part 2 done.