A simple answer is fine, but I’m sure there are some great stories around!
There has already been a thread where people told their stories, but it was over a year ago, and I wanted to start a thread for once! 
I wanted to post to find out about this because I realised I don’t meet a whole lot of new people, and I wondered what the most likely situation/place to meet someone would be.
Anyway, please reply!
For me:
at work… it was a crappy little part-time job in auto insurance my friend had tipped me off about - through a dingy temp service, no less! - and my grumpy little tulip was there!
She was a temp, too, and she was my trainer for the data entry end of things. I remember well my first impression - “What a bitch!”
We’ve been married 22 months now. We still can’t believe we found such a compatible person at work .
At the quad at my college. I was studying for a French history exam with some fellow students and we were arguing over something Napoleon did. My soon-to-be boyfriend walked over and said, with his wonderful French accent, that we were all wrong.
A few weeks later, we started dating. We got engaged a few months ago. The wedding will be on August 9, 2003.
Phoenix
Work.
Me: Waitress.
Him: Bartender.
His line: “So…when are you gonna let me take you out and spend some money on you?”
The wedding is September 30th.
(Four broke years later. :D)
At a bar featuring a audience participation wet t-shirt contest and a separate beer chugging contest in Akasaka Mitsuke in Tokyo. Billy’s Bar actually. It was an all you can eat and drink night for about $60 IIRC. ChinaWife was taking part in the beer chugging contest but passed on the wet t-shirt thing. Married over 8 years now.
College.
I was dating Lady Chance’s roommate during first semester Freshman year. It was OK. Lady Chance was dating some other guy in our circle of friends. Turns out Lady Chance only lived about 3 miles from me back home and we hooked up over Spring break second semester.
So effectively I dumped her roomie for her and just switched sides of the room in her dorm.
I’m such a cad. But we’ve been together 17 years now. Next year it’ll be half our lives.
At a casino. Went with a group of people I hadn’t seen for a while and she was a classmate of one of my friends that he dragged along.
Wound up being in my first casino and getting my first “real” kiss in the same night :).
BITnet Relay. May it rest in peace.
Personal ad, when I was 22 and wanted a male companion for hitchhiking (and maybe more, but I left that a bit vague).
I got 55 reactions and felt like a empress (or a casting director)sorting them out.
I replied personally back to 5 guys with my photo and adress.
Two of them did not respond back -well, thats all in the game, no?
So three candidates were left… I went on a short holiday trip with Guy 1 and on another trip with Guy nr 2, and had a good time. One of those trips resulted in a 3-month affair with Guy nr 1.
A few weeks after the affair ended, I got a letter from Guy nr 3, saying, well, sorry I delayed six months sending your picture back, but here it is and how are you? Later he confessed to me that he had timed his response carefully: “If I wait 6 months, that girl is either married, or she is single again and all the competition is out of the way”
A little blue, I agreed to meet hem, just to get the whole personal- ad-thing to a rounded end.
That was in 1990 and he has been my SO ever since!
I did it the same as Maastricht. A couple of co-workers and I challenged each other to place an ad in the personal section of a local want ad paper called the Little Nickel. I was the only one to actually do it and received over 70 responses. The first letter I opened was sent by my current wife. We have now been married for over 12 years and I couldn’t be happier.
Something that freaked me out was about a year after my ad ran, a woman that sent me a letter was arrested and later convicted for killing her boyfriend. I knew it was her because the picture she sent me was the same one all the newpapers used.
The only ones that have actually worked for a while all started at work, oddly enough.
One person that I met who was the roommate of someone I met online (yeah, I know…) lasted the second longest.
Otherwise, for those I’ve met at parties, clubs, etc. I’ve never been with them for longer than a couple of months.
Just the ones that lasted for a decent bit:
I met my last two SOs (and the two longest relationships of my life) at The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When I was dating (and engaged to) the first one, everyone kept telling me that Rocky relationships don’t last unless you stop going to the show. I guess they were right, because I ended up leaving that guy for my current love, and we quit Rocky. We’ve been together for almost 2 years now, and married for 2 months.
There’s actually a long dramatic story behind all that, but I won’t go into it. Those of you who know me have already heard it (and probably more than once).
I met her at a science fiction convention(Norwescon) in Seattle. Neither one of us had come up with enough money to get a room, so we, and about 15 other people, hid in the Hospitality Suite after it shut down. Talking lead to cuddling, and cuddling lead to…
Working at a video store.
He had just started working there, and was rooming with another co-worker who actually was the one who got me my job. Well, I knew he was taking martial arts classes, and was really interested in finding a good instructor for kick-boxing or something similar, but I’d never really spoken to him much before.
About two weeks after he started working there, we were robbed. The only people working were me and his roommate that got me the job. It wasn’t a big deal, nobody got hurt and the guy got caught, but my soon-to-be SO decided it would be a great time to invite me to a self-defence class. :
: This was 3 1/2 years ago. We’ve been married for over a year now.
I thought I had told this story before, but I couldn’t find it on the link provided so it might have been on another thread or someplace else. Who knows?
I had taken a job as an English teacher at a relatively large high school in Western Kansas (about 1,400 students which is large for Western Kansas) and somehow I became the head of the department after a couple of years. I had gone up to the school early in August one year to make sure all my teachers had enoung supplies, instructions and support when they came in to set up in the following couple of weeks. I should point out that I had just gotten back from a four-week canoe trip down the Arkansas River (doing a story for a magazine) so my hair and beard were very scaggly. In addition, I was in an old work shirt and old work pants (afterall I was up there to do grunt work - moving books into rooms and setting up work rooms for my teachers and cleaning out closets).
The school had hired three new English teachers over the summer and two of them I had missed the interviews on so I didn’t know them, but I decided to move their books into their rooms just to help out. I was schleping a load of books down to one of the new teacher’s rooms when I found her in. She was an attractive young thing.
She introduced herself to me, and I said my first name and was about to tell her my last and tell her that I was her department head, when she started telling me to move the desks around, then to help her set up this or that display, to help her move this or that and finally to take a table out and “put it whereever they are supposed to be”.
After about an hour of this (it was clear she thought I was the janitor), she slipped me $5 and asked me if I could think of anything else she should do get officially set up for her first day of school as a teacher. I suggested that she might check in with her department head. She thought it was a good suggestion. I told her I thought I had seen him down at his classroom earlier. I offered to take her. When we got there, surprisingly enough we couldn’t find him. We searched that whole school looking for her department head and couldn’t find him anywhere. We even stopped people in the hall (that I knew knew him) and I asked them if they had seen him and while they seemed confused at times they usually gave us some directions, but no luck aat finding him.
Finally we went by the office and I suggested she go inside and ask the secretaries because I had work to do. I waited outside the glass-fronted office and watched her ask the secretaries where she might find the English department head. I watched as the secretaries looked at her as if she were a little strange and then point at me who, by this time, was waving at her through the glass front. I watched the secretaries (who had just figured out what I had been doing) totally lose it laughing, and I further watched as the new teacher stormed out of the office in tears of embarrassment, come over to me and slap me.
That was over 20 years ago. We have been together ever since (well, all except that first couple of weeks she wouldn’t speak to me).
P.S. I still have the $5 she slipped me.
Good story, TV time.
I’ve been involved with men (where “involved” means anything from a few dates to a fling to a serious long-term relationship) that I’ve met at school, work, through friends, a dating service, and DopeFests. So far, I like DopeFests best, as that’s where I met the (current) SO.
SO number one: Online. We RPd together for a few years before hooking up. Distance really screwed things up.
SO number two: IRL. At a LARP. I was a new player…he was an ST. Very happy with him. :).
TV time, that is a great story.