Let me tell you my nerdy little secret: I met my husband over 10 years ago online. Yes, online. Not surprising today, according to match.com, 1 out 4 relationships start online but back then it wasn’t really mainstream. It all started when I had discovered professional wrestling, i.e. the WWF (as it was known back then) My niece had extolled the virtues of one Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson so I tuned in one night. Oh my, he was lovely…..but I digress. I came for the Rock but ended up staying for the sport of wrestling.
I began to devour everything I could about the sport and the men and women who participated in it. And once I discovered sites like Wrestling Observer and then fansites like The Brides of Kane where fans actually wrote about it, I was in heaven. I began making submissions to little sites that I can’t even remember the names of now, usually with pen names of ‘Brood-y Mama’ (I was a big fan of the Brood) and ‘From the Front Desk of the Smackdown Hotel’. It was fun to write about this sport that captured my imagination.
Anyway, I came upon a site called CRZ.net and began writing a weekly column. I didn’t know it at the time but I was the first woman to write there. One day I guess opined in my column that I’d appreciate some feedback and got a nice little email from one Marvellous Martin. He told me I was doing a good job and to keep it up. I thanked him and he responded and that was that. A few months later I got another email from M and it just clicked (nothing really romantic just we were in sync with each other). As a matter of fact, I remember us griping about Valentine’s Day and mocking romantic films for making it seem so easy.
We started emailing almost daily and then moved onto AIM. He’d also invited me to join the Oracles, which were a band of writers from the CRZ site that made a group on the Delphi forums. They’d recently gotten into trouble for invading a Buffy forum and asserting that the vamps looked like crap, much to the dismay of the Buffyverse there. There were some good guys in that group. (Shout out to Mr. T, Shawn, Butch, Tan, Jeremy, Todd, Mancuso, Crippler Hellspawn and some others!)
I’d always been a fan of British culture so now I actually knew someone in England! So after nearly a year of talking (we’d moved onto phone calls after 7 months) I’d decided to go for a visit. My mother would give me horror stories of people getting killed by internet dates but I was an adult so what could she do? I went to Southport in April of 2001, Martin and his mother were kind enough to pick me up at the airport. We’d finally met face to face. I’d gotten a place in town, at a lovely bed & breakfast. I was the only guest since it was offseason.
I left 10 days later, in love. Martin visited me that August and got to experience 9/11 with me. That Christmas break (I work at a college) I went back to Southport. In June 2003, we had a house fire and lost a lot. Thankfully, Martin had already booked a visit with me right after that and took my mind off of it by getting down on one knee and proposing! And then spent most of his visit cleaning out my house and moving my stuff to a friend’s house- I knew then he was a keeper.
We made plans to get married that next October. I wanted Halloween but my mother wanted none of that so I compromised with October 30. We’re coming up on our 7th anniversary this year and I can’t express what joy this man brought to my life. He’s been my rock. 6 months after we got married, I lost my Mom to cancer and I was so lucky to have him to lean on. I look back at our computer romance and marvel at what it became. When I hear people complain about long-distance romances, I think back about our story. It wasn’t easy but we made it through.
Happy Anniversary, sweetie! And many many more!
