#NerdsUnite: I met my husband on @PlentyOfFish (Online dating Vs. Meeting someone on the internet PT 3)

Dec 8

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Jessica. She and I met through this loverly site, and by her reaching out to me asking if she could write for us. Really rad chickie, she provided a lot of insight into my childhood (something you don't get every day from someone!!) - andddddd she has quite the life story. Like did you know she moved cross country for love? ORRRR that she found out her ex cheated on her by reading it on Facebook? ANNNNDDDD she even married a guy she met off of Plenty of Fish! Yep, true story! This is life as told through her eyes, and through the keyword of the nerd. HIT IT JESSICA!!! </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @ItsJessWeaver

Check out Part I and Part II of this story.

After I broke up with the married deadbeat dad, I was…lost. I literally felt directionless and confused. Here I thought I had it together—engaged, planning a future, trying to get back into school—and it turned out none of it was what I thought. At 28 years old I was back to square one. I was living alone in my own apartment for the first time in my life.

I got a cat. I started going out to local bars and clubs, something I hadn’t done since college. I had a lot of friends willing to take me out and get me plastered. Honestly, it was really, really fun to just let go. I’d lived with a lot of anxiety and the chance to relax and explore was pretty exhilarating. I got on Match.com and Zoosk, and started chatting with dudes. I met a guy on there who I dated for a month (Zoosk) and someone who I dated for three months (Match.com), and both were decent dating relationships. With Zoosk, there was the constant and instant facebook connection—I could see who the guy was for real, right away. Match.com seemed to me to be much more of a showcase. I read a ton of profiles with catchy descriptions. The dude I ended up dating for three months had a killer profile—super witty, very confident, and entertaining. I knew right away this would be a guy I could talk with. We are both very sarcastic. We had a couple bumps at the beginning, but things were nice—I was happy. After three months I wanted an idea of where this relationship was going—I wanted to accelerate things, have a progression…and that wasn’t happening. We were just kind of…coasting. No “I love you,” not a lot of super cheesy “I’m really into you” kind of stuff, and I LIKE that stuff. I MISSED it. Granted—it wasn’t really fair. When you come out of a committed live-in, long term relationship you have certain habits and expectations. No new relationship is going to meet those. You have to let them go. Still, I had a feeling it would end if I pushed, and it did. And I wasn’t that bummed. Yes, I missed him—but I was actually relieved I didn’t miss him that much, because that meant I hadn’t fallen head over heels in love with him. Part of me was worried if I started dating again I’d just fall in love with any old slob I met who was willing to look at me twice.

After that I decided to join PlentyofFish.com. I had actually paid Match.com, and I wasn’t into doing that again. POF is free, so for sure, they have a LOT of profiles. I liked how you could message and chat with someone right then, if you wanted, and I liked how you could really control what kind of people you wanted to talk to. It felt more honest, to me, than Match.com had, and I wanted to be honest. Still, I had dudes messaging me with profile-improvement advice. No, they didn’t want dates. They wanted to tell me how to market myself better. One guy said I came off as a total bitch because of something I’d said on my profile. I’d written, “I don’t do sex on the first date, so if that’s why you’re here, forget it.” He said I sounded uptight and bitchy, and FRIGID. UM, yeah, thanks for the advice, dude. Whatever. I got lots of other messages, for potential dates, and I went on one first date with a guy I’d been emailing for about a week after we first messaged on POF. He was cool—our ideas of life and happiness seemed to match up, our humor was pretty similar, and he seemed like a genuinely nice guy. Our first date wasn’t bad, except that from moment one I knew there was no spark between us. Not even one tiny hint. That’s the thing online dating can’t tell you. The chemistry is just something you can’t predict.

I started over. I first messaged a new guy, Tim, after noticing something ODD on his profile. He had a typical profile. It wasn’t flashy. He mentioned his interests, his idea of romance and a good relationship. It was unremarkable except for the last sentence.

“I am not into big girls.”

Ok, I’ll admit. I was interested. OK. I was provoked. I sent him a message asking him what he meant by that. Like…was I a “big girl?” WHAT exactly, did he think a “big girl” was?

What an ice-breaker. He messaged me back explaining that no, he didn’t think I was a big girl. He meant really big girls. Specifically, big girls who lie about being big on dating profiles. He had messaged a girl on there and talked with her a bunch of times on the phone, and she’d never posted a picture of her body. Just her headshots, really, and when they finally met, she was a foot shorter than him and so large he couldn’t even get his arms around her. Now, that might have been ok if he’d known—or at least, he ought to have been able to judge that from the beginning…but she surprised him. There was no reason to do that. Plenty of guys like girls who are larger. No need to lie or deliberately mislead someone. He went home and added that little line to his profile, hoping he wouldn’t be duped again. He was so honest and open about it, I was really charmed. Plus, he admitted it might have been a little vague. I’m a 12/14 myself, and 5’8’’. I’m not a waif. He made it VERY clear that he saw all my pictures and did not think I fell into the category of “too big.” By that time, it felt like we were old friends—talking about life, dating online, and how honest you should be when you’re putting yourself out there. We BOTH felt like our online profiles should be honest. You should be able to say what body type you are into or whether or not you want to have sex on the first date.

So we messaged for a few days, and then got on yahoo video chat, which was really cool. I could see him sitting there in his office chair, just being a normal guy, and he could see me. I just didn’t want to keep doing that, though. I’d learned from my bad first date, and didn’t want to spend a bunch of time emailing a guy I’d never met. One of the great things about sites like POF is if you want to meet, you can just go on a date, that night. We planned a Saturday mall date (so eighth grade, I know) but that Friday night we were video chatting and I said I had to go get ready for a party at a friend’s house. I really wanted to meet him, pretty bad…so I just asked him if he was busy that night. If not, he could come to my friend’s party. I figured he could meet my friends—A HUGE DEAL, since they felt pretty protective of me after my bad break-up—and if we didn’t hit it off, no harm done. He could just go home and we wouldn’t chat anymore. No need to drag it out. He was down—can you tell how totally matter-of-fact we are as people??—and pretty much just hopped in the car to come over. We told him to meet us at the local Kroger market so we could scope him out (because you know, by this time, ALL my friends were involved) and make sure he wasn’t a total creeper. He was coming to my friend’s house, after all. I didn’t want her to end up on a milk carton.

So we piled into my friend’s truck. There were five of us crammed in there because nobody was going to miss this for anything. Suddenly everyone had something they wanted at Kroger. We pulled into the parking lot and I saw him walking away from his car toward the front doors, and I just started grinning. I looked like a total idiot, but there was something about him. I liked his car. I liked his face. The feeling was mutual, and as the night wore on, it became obvious there was something going on in the air between us. We were stuck like glue to each other. I have never felt completely, instantly comfortable with someone like that before. We got tipsy. We did Wii karaoke. We played party games, we told jokes, we ate junk food, and we fell in love.

It got to be pretty late, and I was feeling very much like I didn’t want to call it a night. We both had had a bit to drink, and didn’t want to drive home so late. Everyone left and my friend, with a twinkle in her eye, told us we could each take a couch. YEAH. SURE. That’s gonna happen. Of course, we picked the giant overstuffed armchair and just curled up there together, talking. I was tired, but I was completely energized, at the same time. We didn’t sleep. Things got quiet. We laid there for a while, not talking. My hip started to hurt (I was in a motorcycle accident a few years ago) from being crammed into that armchair, and I turned over, toward Tim. Well, I didn’t realize how close his face was. He’d been sort of kissing my neck, and then when I turned, he assumed it was for a real kiss. I wasn’t thinking that, at all. But he kissed me, and I let him. And then I kissed him back. It was a perfect accident.

I tease him now that we are still on our first date, because we never really ended that night. We’ve been nearly inseparable since then. I met his parents the next day, he asked me to be his girlfriend two weeks later (marking the occasion with a potted plant because he figured it would live longer than a bouquet of flowers), and asked me to be his wife on Christmas day, 4 months later. 4 months after that, we got married in his parents’ backyard.

Neither of us came into this relationship perfect. We both have our hang-ups, insecurities, and bad habits, but we knew what we were getting into, because we had built our love on honesty. There isn’t any subject that’s off-limits to us, and we could see that the very first day we started messaging on POF. We are both defiantly honest, unapologetically ourselves, and completely open. At the end of the day, it wasn’t even what we wrote on our dating profiles that mattered—it was the reflection of ourselves we saw in the spirit behind each other’s words that drew us together.