I had just gotten out of a bad relationship and myspace was still pretty cool back then, so I did a search for men in my age range within 25 miles of my house. He was on the second page. I was scrolling down, saw his picture, checked him out and immediately liked what I saw. I sent him a message basically saying, “Hey, so I think you’re hot. What’s up? :)” And three years later I’m wearing my engagement ring and we’ll be married next summer.
Mmmm. Both good, but I vote for the first one.
She left her number on the bathroom stall in the Port Authority bus terminal. I called. The rest is history.
She joined an online fRPG that I play in, and started participating in our regular chats. We got to be friendly, started playing characters in storylines together, then last summer she shocked my socks off by telling me that she liked me. By the end of this summer we’ll be living together. 
I picked him up in a bar. I still remember the shock that went from my head to my toes when I looked up and saw him staring at me with those bedroom green eyes and that come-hither smile. Later, when he stood up and I got a good look at his ass, that was it. He was mine. That was 21 years ago and his ass still looks damn good. Did it just get hot in here? I need to go open a window.
Nobody tell my mom, ok? I told her we were introduced by a local clergy man.
Don’t you judge me!
I met my wife in September 2000 at university in south west England.
We met on the first day of term in our final year - both 22 y/olds. We had next-door rooms in a university residence (a lovely stately Victorian mansion in north Bristol) so we saw each other every day at breakfast and dinner.
I was v. studious whereas Mrs. W was more interested in enjoying her remaining time as a student - she did her best to distract me by playing croquet in an extremely short skirt on the lawn outside my window (it worked!).
But because we lived in the same building we never really “dated” - just got to know each other over the months and gradually got closer and closer.
Quite often I’d be sat in my room in the evening working and as soon as it got to 11.30pm (when the bar shut) I’d wait 5 mins for the sound of feet pounding up the stairs outside, before a slightly tipsy Mrs W. would march in, sweep my papers off the desk, sit herself down and demand attention. 
Apparently Mrs W. decided as soon as she saw me that we’d get married one day. I needed a bit more persuading but got there in the end and we’ve been married nearly 5 years now.
She was sharing a house with an old school friend and his girlfriend.
IPMS convention. She was the good-looking redhead married to a guy in my local branch, I was single. A few years later, she was no longer married and I was still single. We’ve been together for 27 years.
Well, yeah, 9 is like 35 in sheep years.
Picture it: Ann Arbor, late July 2001. I met Dom during freshman orientation. The first thing I noticed about him was that he was painfully nice - not like ‘‘nice guy’’ nice but just a really sensitive, mild-mannered guy. The second thing I noticed was that he was an impossible dork - he talked non-stop about X-Men and cross country running.
I promptly forgot about him until we ended up in the same dorm in the same intensive Spanish program. One evening he stood in my doorway until 3am while we poured our hearts out to one another. I avoided him like the plague for the next year, and when he called me on it, we became best friends.
We fell in love via Instant Messenger during Summer 2002. I didn’t know it was love until one evening, I was having a bad day.
He said, ‘‘If I were there right now I would give you a great big hug.’’
I said, ‘‘If you did that, I would melt into a little puddle on the floor.’’
After a looong pause, his reply: ‘‘Then I would scoop you into a container, wait until you re-solidified, and hug you all over again.’’
I promptly felt like I was going to puke - hence, true love. I was certain he wouldn’t want to be with a crazy person, but just my luck, his passion is psychology and I am therefore clinically fascinating. 
Smart, pretty and interesting: what’s not to love?
I moved in next-door to him.
We met in a small start up church. The woman I was seeing at the time decided we weren’t exclusive anymore - she neglected to mention it to me, but I found out.
The Lovely and Talented Mrs.Shodan-to-Be always came to church with her room mate. I thought they were gay. Turns out they weren’t. That was in 1979.
She asked me, after we had been married for a while, why I asked her out first instead of her room mate. I made the mistake of being honest. She has a bigger chest.She wouldn’t talk to me for about three hours.
Regards,
Shodan
I married a belly dancer I met in Las Vegas.
I had only been on SDMB a short while and had never met anyone here IRL, and had never been to Vegas, so when someone arranged a dopefest I figured I might as well attend. Zyada and I hit it off, mailed back and forth, phoned, visited a few times, and here I am.
(We’re a well matched pair - we both forgot our fifth anniversary, and didn’t do anything special for the sixth. Maybe for number 7.)
Short story: We met at the restaurant we both work at.
Long story: I started cooking in a kitchen in the fall of 2006 to help pay my way through grad school. She started working there as a hostess about a year later. I already knew her sister, because she was a waitress there (that’s how she got her job.) Her and I never really hung out, maybe once or twice if I was doing something at her sister’s place (she was under 21, so was never able to grab drink with everyone after work.)
It wasn’t until Jan/Feb of 2009 that we started really hanging out. A bartender from work was looking for a couple extra people for the low-rollers bowling league at the local lanes, and we both joined. So for a few months we were hanging out both at bowling, and more at other things. Had I been better with women, we might have started dating then, but another guy on the bowling team could see I was interested in her, and saw it as a “challenge” to “win” her (yeah, he’s that type…) So they dated for just a couple of months in the spring.
That summer we were still hanging out a lot, and finally in mid-August we were at her house watching a movie, she started a tickle fight with me (one of several she had started with me in those months…and yet I still didn’t realize she had the hots for me, somehow…) and she finally get fed up with me not making a move and just kissed me. We then had a “thing” for a couple weeks in August…we never really defined that we were dating, maybe we should have, because in September she left to do a semester abroad. While there, because we never clarified things, she slept with her ex-boyfriend that was also doing a semester abroad.
When she got back in December she said she was “too confused” about which one of us she had more feelings for…we had a lot of awkwardness for several more months, including a couple sexings, but still nothing “defined.” Finally, last September, I asked her to be my date to a wedding…I guess that was “final” enough for her to say we were dating, and we’ve been together ever since.
The local record store had a paper with record reviews, etc. And they would stick in free classified ads if they were short a few column inches. Most of them were in the “Band seeks bass player” genre. So I decided to try to meet other Kate Bush fans by putting in an ad. In much of the world, Kate Bush is well known, but in Kansas City, in the early 1980s, she was deeply obscure and I didn’t know any other Kate fans. So my ad said:
Kate Bush fan with records, videos
would like to meet other fans to buy, trade.
…with an address to write to.
I got one response. She had no idea that I was a guy, she just wanted to see those videos. Her letter included a phone number, I called her and we talked and agreed to meet at the record store. She brought her sister-in-law as a wingman in case I turned out to be a psycho.
She visited my apartment to look at my Kate collection, we hit it off and have been together ever since.
The funny thing is that neither of us remember the exact date we met - we can only get a rough two week stretch, but it was after the Peter Gabriel concert on December 4th, 1982 - we had each attended, but with different people. So, as we close in on 30 years together, we have only a vague idea of exactly when. Being colossal movie geeks, we decided that the December 16th release of The Return of the King, otherwise known as “Trilogy Tuesday”, was henceforth going to be our official anniversary date.
In high school. Year 8. We were 14. It was fun for a while. Then it was serious. Then it was easy and natural
Work. Before I was smart enough to know not to date people i work with. 