Anniversary... 7 years in....

TODAY IS MY ANNIVERSARY...

We are currently here....

Cape San Blas

Celebrating with dog in tow...



That's him running off up the beach .. little bugger!

 



Anyway, as much as I'd like to stay here talking to you I have celebrating to do.. so I'm re-posting our internet love story for you to be sick over... have a great weekend... we will!

Before I go on I'll give a certain reader in Oxford an opportunity to grab a sick back as she hates all things lovey dovey!

Meeting my husband is somewhat of a love story. We met online in 2002 on what we both thought were local dating sites. I’d been recommended a site by a friend who’d met her subsequent husband and I thought go on then, I’ll give it a whirl.

For those of you who’ve never tried internet dating it can be more of an eye opener. I met some interesting types .. The man who claims to be 6ft…and so you wear your heels when you meet in the pub for the 1st time and find yourself looking over his head….

Wishful thinkers….

The man who sends you a picture of himself when he used to be in the Air Force, all dashing in his uniform

Only to find that we are 10 years on and he now looks like this…

Dreamers

I even met some men who just weren’t themselves.. I mean they were not the men in the photo they’d sent at all..! I asked one if he’d used a fake photo (I was in a busy outdoor patio so could escape quickly over the low balcony if need be) and he admitted that he’d used his friend’s picture.. When I asked him why, he’d responded that he thought I wouldn’t meet him if he’d used his own picture… not a good way to start a blind date!

Anyway I met my husband by chance. He was trying to get out of his membership (incidentally this is notoriously difficult, you need to navigate about 40 screens to find a way to cancel a membership on these sites!) and came across my picture (and yes I’d used a relatively recent one at the time)… of me from a holiday that year..

My husband said he’d thought my picture was cute and he laughed at the ‘profile’ I’d created… something about wanting a tall, non-Manchester United fan, who couldn’t see the attraction of Crown Green Bowling (I had to explain that bit too him). It took 3 emails for him to tell me he was in Dallas so as much as I’d laughed at his words I thought it wasn’t likely that we’d ever meet. At this point I did not have a picture of him, but loved that he was a wordsmith, and of obvious intelligence.

A week after our 1st email contact he asked if he could call me… I was beside myself with excitement. He’d never called outside the country before and had to go and buy a calling card.. I was on the way to a concert with my Mother and two friends the 1st time he called.. Such a deep, sexy voice and a lovely southern American accent with a bit of a Dallas twang at the time! I loved it straight away. I told him I’d call back when I got home.

16 hrs later, and one of the only days I’ve ever had to take off from work,we finished our 1st conversation. I can say hand on heart that my connection to him was already sealed... it was like we’d known each other for years.

We started making plans to meet, I would have gone there but he insisted he’d come to England, having to sort a passport out in super quick time to make his flight which was booked for 3 weeks after our 1st telephone call. I nearly went broke that 1st month in telephone bills, I didn’t know about Skype / or MSN then and call quality was poor…

Four weeks after 1st talking I was standing at Gatwick airport waiting to collect him..I already knew that if we got on in the flesh that he would be the man I’d marry… a strange feeling, but I just knew.

He spent 9 days here.. of course we hit it off like a house on fire … the hardest part..saying goodbye and telling my parents that I was getting married when they came back from their Florida vacation … for him .. saying goodbye and telling his Mom that he was marrying a girl from 4000 miles away that she’d never met.

Oh did I forget to tell you that he proposed to me in the rose garden at Warwick castle?

the rose garden at Warwick Castle

Warwick Castle at dusk

We managed to leave his new camera when we left at dusk… he was so excited!

That was nearly 8 ½ years ago. We had a transatlantic romance for a year and a bit, going backwards and forwards ..lots of fun times and expense!

And the in February 2004 we were married in St Thomas in the Virgin Islands in front of 23 of our closest friends and family. It was a beautiful sunny day, with the British Virgin Islands in the background..prophetic really..

My friend Anne was there.. you can read her blog here… she claims even she had a good time!

Anne...amazingly not burnt

We are still really happy (he is, after all my soul mate) and here’s to another 7 years and the rest!