“Distance between two hearts is not an obstacle; rather a great reminder of just how strong true love can be.”
I never thought that I would actually find the love of my life online. I’d been down that road before, I’d had flirtations and crushes that had burned me and it just didn’t seem that it was possible for anything real to develop between two people so far apart. Even less likely to me was the possibility that any of this could happen in the online game I play, World of Warcraft.
But, a few months into my addiction that has become WoW, I began talking to Chris. We had been talking casually in the game with the other people we played with for about a month before we began to talk regularly on Yahoo messenger. We seemed to click really well and I liked him a lot as a new friend, a surprising guy friend that really listened to me talk. And oh the things that I talked about.
At the time, I was busy being burned by one of those online crushes I mentioned. I had begun talking to a guy around the same time I first met Chris. It was a disaster from the start. A real jerk, who left me feeling even lower about myself than I had before. Chris was there for me through it all, giving out advice, trying to encourage me, even though shortly after it all began he had admitted to me that he really liked me. This was a surprise to me, I never thought he’d feel that way about me. I knew he had a kid, he’d been married, and I just never thought he’d see me like that. But we’d been talking for a while, through messages and on microphones and started to talk on the phone too.
I definitely had noticed how in sync we seemed to be, but I had so much on my plate with what else was going on that I didn’t persue anything with him and he tried not to let his feelings show too much, to just be a friend for me when I really was needing one. But, it didn’t seem to work out that way, and conversations about the two of us would spark up quite a lot. It hurt him to hear me talk about someone else, to actually have to try to give me advice on how to make things work with someone who didn’t seem very interested in even being a good friend to me, though I didn’t realize this at the time.
Eventually, he had to just be honest, brutally, and tell me how he really felt about the situation. It hurt me to hear him talk to me so harshly, but what he was saying was true and I knew it and I had been trying to tell myself the same things to no avail. I was afraid to let go of one thing for something else; I didn’t want to get hurt again in such record time. But Chris had already told me that he knew he was in love with me, I was everything he’d ever wanted in a significant other. He was sure, he knew that I was the one he wanted to be with.
We kept talking, constantly, and the subject of what I was going through stopped coming up. I was no longer speaking to the guy I had been hung up on and I was beginning to realize how stupid I’d been to waste my time. Having conversations on the phone with Chris for hours, seeing him smiling and laughing at me over webcam, I couldn’t believe it, but I really did want to give into the voice in the back of my head; I wanted to give him a chance, but could I risk getting hurt; was I just rushing?
When we would finally get off the phone at night, Chris would tell me that he loved me. He didn’t expect me to say it back, he knew that wasn’t something I was ready to say, and he didn’t know at the time if it was something that I’d ever be ready to say to him. But, he had let go of what was holding him back, and he wasn’t playing the games. He was just being straight up honest with me about how he felt and that he wanted me, and he wasn’t giving up on me.
We had started early on in our phone conversations of playing a question game. We took turns asking a question to the other, we couldn’t turn the questions around, and we had to ask some serious questions every now and then. I found out so much about him from that game, and about myself. We agreed on so many things, we wanted so many of the same things from life and from a lover. I’d never been in a real serious physical relationship. My closest thing to one was my high school boyfriend. Even more reason for me not to believe I’d find my husband this way, or at all.
It was amazing what talking to Chris was doing for me. I had never opened up to anyone the way I was opening up to him. Our conversations became more serious, and we asked each other questions about different scenarios involving us as a couple. We flirted and complimented each other and as long as we were both awake we were talking in some way – either on the phone or on messenger, or text messaging.
I couldn’t take it anymore. One night I asked him a particularly memorable question. “How do you feel about anniversaries?” We both talked about how we felt about celebrating them and Chris made the comment that it would be difficult to pick an apporpriate date for us. So I went for it, he’d given me the perfect opportunity and I asked him why didn’t we make it this night. He asked me if I was saying that I wanted us to be an official couple starting that night and I said I was, I wanted to be with him. So May 13th became our anniversary. It wasn’t long before I told him that I loved him too, I couldn’t hold it in when I knew it was true. It had happened sort of fast, but as far as we were concerned it all happened exactly as it should. I’d found my best friend months ago, I never thought I’d be lucky enough that that person would be the love of my life, but here we are. We’ve been together since, and I only grow to love him more and more everyday. He proposed to me on Christmas day of 2008 and I’m looking forward to spending the rest of my life with him.
