Tales From The Trenches: Tale #8 - So About What I Said

Feel like getting a little muddy in the trenches today? Today’s tale comes to us from reader, B, and here’s her story. An incredibly inspiring read that gives me hope!

As always, feel free to email me your very own tales at mellow1422 [at] aol [dot] com. I hope to hear from you very soon!

For many years, I felt I was destined to become one of those old women with lots of cats in a dilapidated house who frightens the neighbourhood children. I’m a strong-minded, vegetarian, non-alcohol drinking geek – and you’d be surprised just how many men see the third one as a big turn off in the UK. Also, I wasn’t going to simply accept the first man that paid me some attention – I quote that line from Clueless “You know how picky I am about shoes, and they only go on my feet!” Not that too many ever did, mind you.

I can honestly say that, at 32, I had given up on ever finding anyone that was right for me; someone who looked past the fact I don’t drink and can still be fun, someone who didn’t mind that I don’t dig into a steak every night and that I spend a large part of my time in front of a computer screen. And you know what? I was sort of OK with that.

Then I met him.

The official story, if anyone outside of our friends and family asks, is that we had known each other for a while and things developed from there.

Now, essentially, that is the truth. But, as with most things, the devil is in the detail. You see, we might have “known” each other for more than a year, but we had never actually met. That’s right, Never Met. I mentioned being a geek, but I didn’t tell you I was an online gamer. I know! Anyway, we met when we “teamed up” in a game. And things developed from there.

It was apparent quite soon on (to us and others in our group) that we got on well and had loads in common (other than being super geeks), but we both had that healthy, grown-up attitude of “all people online are weirdos,” and so we stayed simply chatting for months, firstly in game, then MSN, then email and then we swapped mobile phone numbers. From the occasional text, it became almost every five minutes. He was the first person I “spoke” to when I woke up and the last person before I went to sleep. But still, we resisted actually meeting – partly due to the fact we lived at opposite ends of the country.

Then, one night, the conversation went something like, “let’s meet” “when?” “now, right now”. And so he set off and I set off, and we met, after many hours of driving, in the middle. We ate cake, we talked into the wee hours and then we went to our respective homes. We had seen photos of each other (thank you, Facebook), but we didn’t know if that all important chemistry would be there when we actually met. It was. I think I was partly in love with him before we even met.

I admit to you that, if we had met in a club or a bar, I would have seen that he was good-looking, but I would have written him off as too young (seven years my junior) and too short (a good four inches). Bbut because we already knew and liked so much about each other before we even got down to how we look, none of the other stuff mattered.

To cut a long story short, I now have a white gold engagement ring on my finger, and I’m still slightly shocked every time I wonder what that odd feeling on my left hand is and see it. We’re getting married on the same day and in the same place we met for cake.

I guess I wanted to tell you this to let you know that people can get past that superficial “is it all about how I look?” and learn to love all the other qualities that actually make someone who they are.