The Meeting

My name is Andrew, and I am getting married on October 10, 2010. Between now and then, I am going to try to keep a weekly blog of our progress as we plan our event.

For starters, though, I'd like to give some background. I moved to Las Vegas in October 2001, to work as a children's librarian. I had just finished earning my Masters in Library Science from the University of Arizona in Tucson and wanted to stay in the Southwest. In the years following, I would go through periods where I felt lonlier than others, and during one of those periods (probably around 2002 or 2003) I placed a free Yahoo Personals ad to try to meet people.

When I placed the ad, I used a Yahoo account that I had set up basically as a junk mail account, to use whenever a web site required me to register with them just to read stuff. The personals ad never really worked out for me. I pretty much got three types of responses: Internet porn sites spamming personals ads to get people to come to their pay-per-view porn sites, mail-order brides spamming personals ads trying to get people to pay their way to the US, and women who looked uncomfortably like Ernest Borgnine. After a while, I stopped checking for responses, and since the email account was never for anything I needed, I only checked it every six months or so. Sometimes longer.

A little after July 4, 2008, I happened to check that email account, to clear it out. I saw that on July 4, someone had looked at my ad and sent me an "icebreaker" (a canned note that said that they liked my profile on Yahoo Personals). Since it had only been a day or so earlier, I went to see who had been checking me out.

The picture on the profile was cute. (Always important.) More importantly, her profile read like a human being had put some thought into writing it. It didn't have any of the usual phrases like "Just looking for a nice guy" (always bulls#!t) or "Aren't there any nice guys in Vegas?" Most importantly, it included the phrase, "In my geekier moments, I enjoy British sci-fi and comedy, and Japanese Anime."

So, okay, I'm a geek. I'm not sure how finely you would have to calibrate a geekometer to judge what would make some moments geekier than others, but some of my particular passions are British sci-fi and comedy, and Japanese Anime. So either my friends were playing a trick on me, or I had to meet this woman.

So we began corresponding via email and chat. (I've never really chatted online with anyone before. First time for everything.) Unfortunately, it was a busy time for me, getting ready to do a presentation at a conference, so we weren't able to meet until September. Even that was fraught with problems; due to a misunderstanding, she didn't show up to our first meeting, so we rescheduled for the following day. About an hour before we were supposed to meet, she texted me to ask if we could change the location to a restaurant in a casino on the Strip. I hate going to the Strip; I can never find my way around. But I wanted to meet her, so I said yes.

And we met, and it went okay. We kept going out, and after a couple of months, we decided that things seemed to be working out, and that we would become an exclusive couple.

Next week: The Proposal