The Beginning

I guess I should start from the beginning. Of course just saying that leads to the question of what beginning am I talking about? There are so many for any person. I am going to start at the beginning of the journey I am on right now.

I met my husband sort of on a fluke. A friend of mine asked me to set up a profile on plentyoffish.com, a free dating site, because he wanted to know what I thought of it. He was going to try to make his own dating site and wanted to use this model as sort of a template. That never happened but I did create a profile.

I weeded through the typical ridiculous chat requests with men that ranged from needy, perverse, emotionally unstable, angry, too nice, too whatever and stumbled one day upon Anthony. I think my first chat to him was something about his tattoos. I was intrigued by all of the ink on his body. I had never really been interested in men with tattoos but I sent him a message with the ultra clever line of "hey nice ink" or something that made me want to cringe after I hit send. I do think that I had a couple of glasses of wine that night or so I like to tell myself now.

He responded with something snarky and we started IM'ing each other almost everyday. I kind of thought he was a jerk online but I know now he's just a very direct person. After two weeks of that I finally just said "So are we going to meet or not?" because I was just not wanting to just IM someone all the time without meeting him.

He gave me a few options of where we would go and we settled on this little BYOB Italian place called Joe's Pizza. I was nervous driving there but also a little annoyed that I was even going. I don't know if it was because he seemed so standoffish, but I was curious. When he got out of his car I see this 6"4 blonde with spiky hair walking towards me. He was wearing a tank top (to show off his tats I guess) and his motorcylce boots (he doesn't own a motorcycle). When he first spoke I was shocked by how low his voice was. I was even more intrigued now.

We ordered our pizza and then sat there for a good two hours just talking. In person he was very warm, genuine and smart. We talked about a lot of different things and then found out that we had the exact same birthday (one year apart). After taking up booth space for that long we decided to go back to his mom's house and watch a movie. The whole time I was driving there I was thinking "What am I doing?" but I went anyways. We watched V for Vendetta and listened to music. My stomach was in knots because I realized I really liked this guy. I had been alone for so long that I wasn't really ready to feel that way, but I did.

I left his house by sneaking out really early in the morning which we joke about now. That day I was giddy but nervous. Would he call me again? Would this really work out? He's not my typical type etc. All these thoughts going on in my head.

We didn't hang out that next night but after that we were together every single day. My lease was up 6 weeks later. Three weeks into dating him I was looking for an apartment and he had been talking about moving out of his mom's house so he just said "Why don't we look for a place together?" I was shocked he would suggest that and a little taken aback. I didn't know what to think. Financially it made sense because we were staying together every single night anyways so why each pay rent?

Other people in our lives didn't think highly of this decision but we didn't really care. We signed a year lease three weeks after we met and didn't look back. We did get a two bedroom in case something went horribly wrong, but it didn't.

That's a good beginning so far.