sean + bekah: the meeting

This is the second in a series of posts telling our "love story." The series begins here with our prequel.

I had decided it was time to meet new people and make new friends. To help me out, I turned to the internet. I signed up for assorted dating and social sites. I wasn't looking for a boyfriend, per se. I generally prefer male company to females...I just don't like the drama. Sorry, not sorry. I went into the process with the mindset that if a relationship came out of any of this, great. If not, no harm done.

Several meetings came out of this networking. Many first dates that never saw a second. My crappy relationship had given me the gift of seeing crap for what it was and moving on.

There was the 23 your old divorced guy who bragged on money and talked about his cheating ex-wife the whole time. No thanks. There was the hot army guy with the sword who wanted to stick his tongue down my throat right off the bat. Nah. There was the local marine who I had a blast hanging out with who I knew was meant to stay in the friend zone. (ok, that one wasn't crappy. He was a cool guy and he's married now. yay!)

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One of the sites I networked on was match.com. Anyone who knows anything about dating sites knows that they involve money. Money I wasn't willing to spend. So I had this free membership where I couldn't do anything beyond "wink" at people who first contacted me. No writing back, no getting other contact info: the site filtered it out.

At one point, I saw Sean's picture in a "recommended matches for you" e-mail sent to me. I remember liking the picture, but don't remember why I didn't follow up.

A beach lover? Sounds good.

Regardless, I didn't think much of it at the moment. I deleted the e-mail. It's not like I could contact any of those matches if I wanted to anyway.

Pretty sure this was my default pic.

Within a few days, I got an e-mail saying a potential match had sent me an e-mail. I'm sure you smart cookies can guess who it was. Yep, it was Sean. He sent me the brief obligatory hello message, and I responded with, you guessed it, a wink. I guess he knew I wasn't a paid subscriber, so he being the rule breaker he is, slipped me his contact info in a way that slipped through match's filters:

"my name is ********* on aimerz."

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I guess this is when I should mention that this was late 2004 and people still regularly had conversations on AIM. Regardless, it made it through the filters and I found myself logging on to AIM to say hello...



Come back to see what happens next!
[update: read part 3 here]



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