Here on the SDMB in late 1999. I kind of felt like we kept ‘bumping’ into each other in a lot of threads and seemed to have a lot in common.
Started emailing a bit, then IMing, then phone calls that lasted hours and hours. We met in person in Feb. of 2000 when I came out here for a Dopefest. He flew out to NJ a few times, then we spent a week together vacationing in Mexico when he asked me to move to CA and in with him. He flew out in June of 2000 to help load up and drive a U-haul out here. We’ve been together almost 8 years. We’ve been married since June 2003.
Another one to say, “Here.”
We met at a Christmas DopeFest in 2005, but it wasn’t till a year later at another Christmas Dopefest that we really hit it off.
We met for lunch a few weeks later and have been together now for just over a year.
Another “interests in common” match here. He was a Kate Bush fan. I was a Kate Bush fan. Neither of us knew any other Kate Bush fans. He put an ad in a local freebie arts/music paper (the Penny Pitch in Kansas City) that went something like this:
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"Kate Bush fan with records, videos seeks other Kate Bush fans to talk, trade"*
I zeroed in on the word “videos” because I had yet to see one, so I answered the ad, not even knowing if it was submitted by a male or female because there was no name on the ad. I started my letter “Dear mysterious Kate Bush fan” and gave my phone number. He called me and we decided to meet at a safe but familiar place, a record store. My sister-in-law went with me in case he was a psycho (but, as I joked to her, if he was going to commit murder, he’d get two for the price of one) and we went back to his apartment to watch the videos he had. I was in love! With his video cassette recorder, a contraption I’d never seen before but which I’d heard about and lusted after (this was 1982, ok?).
We never really started “dating” as such, we started out as avid, Kate Bush-sharing friends and over the coming weeks just sort of fell into a relationship. It was fast, but so casual that neither one of us remembers when we actually met. It had to have been after December 5, because that was the day of a Peter Gabriel concert. It turns out we were both also huge Peter Gabriel fans and had both gone to that show. Later, we lamented that we hadn’t met a week or so earlier so we could have gone to the show together (he went with someone who wasn’t interested in Gabriel, and I went with my sister-in-law).
There was a checklist of things that told us we were way compatible. Any one of these things would have been deal-breakers for a serious relationship.
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Must be a Kate Bush fanatic. Check.
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Must be a Peter Gabriel fanatic. Check.
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Must like movies. Check. (the first movie we saw together, on cable, was The Elephant Man, and we shared a box of Kleenex sniffling and wiping away tears, so 3a) empathetic and sensitive, check)
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Must like to sit near the front in the movie theater. Check. (the first movie we saw together in the theater was 48 Hours, which we both loved, so 4a) has eclectic taste in movies and can appreciate a funny, raunchy action film as well as an artier film, check)
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Maybe the biggest deal-breaker, we found we both liked to read while we eat. That sounds silly, but it’s very important. It’s annoying to want to read, being antsy with the Need to Read but having someone there who wants to gabber mindlessly with small talk between bites, or is dead silent, chewing while staring off into space and expecting you to do the same, or is telling you that you’re being rude if you do try to read something, anything (the ingredients listing on the mustard bottle), making you feel antsy, guilty and irritated at the same time. What a wonderous feeling of relief when we each realized that the other wasn’t going to cramp our reading-while-eating style. That was our real soul-mate moment, right there, I tell you. To this day, people see us at restaurants and they probably think we hate each other, because we both have our noses stuck in books, but we couldn’t possibly be more in love.
So we’ve been together since sometime in early-ish December 1982. And we still hold hands in public.
**Tripler ** and I met at an Atlanta Dopefest in August of 2006 and got married 364 days later. I think we’re the newly-ist wed Doper couple right now.
We “met” online. Exchanged a few emails; we were students at Queen’s University. We agreed to meet for coffee.
I figured it’d be nice to spend an hour with her and see if there was chemistry. We were there for five hours and left with a date for the next night, and it just went from there. That first meeting was ten years ago Tuesday.
My best friend went to college with him. They actually hooked up a few years ago one drunken St. Pats night (the school they went to does a week-long St. Pats thing, it’s NUTS - literally constant drinking) but nothing ever happened with them after that. I was down at my school in Columbia and said best friend came up for a few days before spring semester started to hang out. Current SO had just moved there for a job after graduation, and best friend called him and invited him over. I didn’t even talk to him when he was at my apartment, I was actually talking to another guy, which did not work out. SO didn’t know many people in town so he IMed me one night, we started talking and hanging out, and we both fell for each other. Been almost one year now.
Waffle House. I shit you not. 1:00 in the morning, my friends and I had just gotten off work, and we made our nightly run to the Awful Waffle for some greasy food and wid-down time. On this particular night, we walk in to find a mysterious someone sitting at “our” table. Being new to the Group, I had no clue who he was, but it turns out he was a cousin of one Groupmate, and a school friend of the others. He was super-hot, and looked all cool and suave and waaaaaaayyy outta my league. And to make matters wose, my sugar was at an all-time low, which means that I had a migraine and was trying desperately not to puke. (Oh, and the bitchiness. Satan’s got nothin’ on me if I don’t feel good!) So after the food, I ran out and went home. (He already thinks I’m stuck-up and/or rude, why add vomiting to the mix?) A few days later, he showed up at a party I was at, and somehow everyone else just sorta disappeared. We ended up talking for the next five hours, which launched a friendship that lasted until the sexual tension got too high and we hooked up. Been together ever since, going on four years now.
Naked in a hot tub (and a pool and a sauna) at a post-Rocky Horror Picture Show cast party. I was impressed that when I asked him to rub my shoulders, that’s all he rubbed - he didn’t even try for an around-the-side boob grab or anything. Plus, he was really cute, college-educated, and a Scorpio (supposed to be a good match for a Taurus).
A few weeks later, he joined the cast (mostly to get my phone number). Eventually, I called him back, and I knew he was something special after our first date. He proposed less than 8 weeks later. We’ll have our 7th anniversary this June, and I’m holding our 3 1/2 week old son while he tries to get our 2 year old to sleep (stupid time change!).
Wow, lots of online and Dopefest meets!
I met my SO at work. It was when I was still on active duty in the Air Force - she was my co-pilot on a trip with multiple stops in South America. We still laugh about my first impression of her - she “landed” the plane in Brasilia, if you can call it that. The landing would have rattled the fillings out of your teeth - it was the worst landing I’ve ever experienced. It happens to all of us, but it happened to her at the worst possible time - the first leg on a trip and she had an instructor (me) watching the whole thing.
We spent the next two weeks laughing about it as we bombed around the rest of the continent. We started dating a few months later, but it has not been easy. We were both on active duty and very quickly got separated (I was moved to west Texas while she was still in New Jersey). She eventually got assigned to the same base as me but shortly after that I left the Air Force and started working for the airlines (in Florida).
It has taken some time but we have both settled down and now work for the same airline (her first, my second) but on different airplanes. I would say that our relationship doesn’t really qualify as the “don’t date someone you work with” rule because there is no such thing as an office setting for us. We do talk about work, but it’s more like two best friends bitching about things.
This probably doesn’t help the OP, but I figured it was unique enough to share!