My college girlfriend claimed to have played a part in getting an IRC server set up on campus network, back when campus networks were brand new. Through that IRC server, I met the person who would later become my wife.

She served me a pizza. Quattro Formagge.

April will be 30 years together.

Installed a package from an opensource repo

I slacked off in high school and went to community college.

Where I continued slacking off. I sat in the back of one of my history classes because it was near an outlet, so I could plug my laptop in, pretend to be taking notes or whatever, but in actuality was just goofing off for most of the class

Next to me sat another slacker, he was goofing off in much the same sort of way, and we hit it off.

He became, and still is, one of my best friends. Most of my friends I can actually trace back to him in some way or another. He’s one of those people whose ability to meet and befriend people everywhere he goes borders on the magical.

One day we met up to go wander around a local flea market/farmers market. We ran into his best friend who also happened to choose that day to go wandering around the aisles of junk looking for hidden treasure.

And that friend brought his girlfriend with him. Years later she would become my wife.

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight. We all wandered around together for a while chit-chatting, and eventually we ported ways. She didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time, nor I on her, I actually don’t think she even remembers this story.

Since we shared pretty much the same circle of friends, we would bump into each other occasionally at parties and such. For a few years I don’t think either of us really thought much about the other, we were just friends of a friend who seemed cool enough.

Eventually, of course, the two of them broke up, as tends to happen. We all stayed in pretty much the same social circles, but she and I didn’t have a whole lot of direct interaction.

One day, that friend from community college hits me up. He’s heading over to the house that she was renting with a couple roommates, no real plans, just chill, have a few beers, watch movies, maybe get some food. So I tag along.

It was basically the three of us hanging out in her living room, and her roommates occasionally wandered in to grab a beer from us before disappearing back into their rooms.

We refer to that night as “The Accidental Nazi Night” because just picking random movies from Netflix, we ended up choosing Iron Sky (about Nazis on the moon,) Equilibrium (dystopian movie with an authoritarian state surprising free expression and such,) and Fire with Fire (where the main villain is a Neo-Nazi)

So that was my first time really spending any sort of quality time with her, just chilling in her living room, killing a case of beer, and watching movies of varying quality.

We became pretty good friends after that. The house she rented basically became the usual hangout place for everyone, so I spent a lot of time there. Funnily enough, she tended to hang out in her room away from all of the action while we were all making a ruckus downstairs.

And so things went for a few years. I’ll be honest, I never really had her on my radar as someone I was interested in dating and was content to be friends.

Apparently she was very interested in me though, and was laying the flirting on pretty thick, and it all went over my head. Eventually she realized she would need to resort to more drastic measures, and one night as we happened to be leaving a friend’s party at the same time, as we got to our cars she grabbed me and kissed me.

And I’ll be honest, that broke my brain a little. From my perspective it kind of came out of nowhere. I kind of had to rethink everything about us and decided, “yeah, fuck it let’s see where this goes”

And so here I am a decade or so later, married for 7 years, and pretty happy with how things all turned out.

Tinder back before it was shit. Really funny though, she was my number neighbor! Like when you have a phone number digit that is one sequence before the other.

I think that means that we had gotten our phone numbers in the same store or at least at the same time years before. It’s our favorite joke

After a big life upheaval, I decided I needed something fun to do, so I hopped on reddit and went to LFG to find an online game of D&D. Had great fun, but scheduling was difficult, so we kept losing players. The DM put out another LFG post and grabbed a few candidates that is remaining players went through.

And so we chose her. And it was great, we were a party again, full of shenanigans and having fun.

COVID hit and everyone and everything went back into upheaval. That DM ended up having to leave so I chose to pick up the reins for my own game. What a game it was. I’ve never had such high highs again as a DM.

Unfortunately through COVID and life itself, we had a lot of heavy things happening. But after a couple of years of knowing these people, we were kinda a found family, despite never having met. So sometimes we’d have calls at 3am when someone needed to talk. Sometimes we’d cancel DnD to do something less intense.

Throughout this, I had been going through my own really heavy things and She was there, treating me more kindly than I knew was possible. She would listen and validate me. She helped talk me down from a ledge or two. She was just endlessly patient and sweet.

So seven years on, we’ve both been through the ringer, been up and down and harder down. But we have grown so much and learned so much together and from one another. She was my best friend and as close as anyone in my life has ever gotten. She’s still my best friend but on Christmas she kissed me, so we’ve been exploring a new angle of our relationship and learning how deeply one can truly love. It’s kinda been a joke between us for a while, but I really think I’m going to marry her and spend the rest of my life trying to make her happy.

Tl;dr: online D&D created a family

OkCupid back when it was good. I’d been on dating apps for years at that point, I was her second match. It’s been 6yrs across two countries

One summer my buddy and I were at his place and he was frequently looking at his phone and typing texts looking annoyed. He said “look, take this number. Get this chick off my back”. In a nutshell… I took my new mission to heart

She lived in an entirely different city across the country (Europe, so like two hours of train ride).

She saw me on Facebook, based on photos from a goth festival in our city, so I got a message on Messanger from a profile without a profile picture and no mutual friends. We talked for a bit, I was single at the time, and we eventually decided to meet. I had no idea how she looks like, and I kind of found this idea of a blind date funny - either it works, or I’ll get a good story out of it.

We decided to meet and go to a local goth scene hangout, and not only she was really pretty, she also brought two bottles of mead. We managed to drink both of them before even getting to the hangout, where it turned out that she was actually not only a classmate of my best friend (a long time ago), but also used to be part of the scene around 5 years ago (before I joined it), before she went no-contact and changed her nickname due to a relationship (that eventually turned out really terrible). So, she knew most of my friends.

That was 7 years ago. At the time she was living in a small flat, after just getting out of a 7 y.o terrible relationship that she couldn’t leave due to having a mortgage, but she managed to save enough on a minimal wage to leave when she found out he was cheating. Her grandma was living with her in her small flat, and she was really a terrible person, even had her aunt with the most entitled child move in, and they were even worse. Always arguing, screaming, being rude, and just acting like dicks. She let them live with her, just because they had nowhere to go, even though she was earning a minimal wage. Them saying that “If we don’t like it, we should move out”, or that “I shouldn’t argue, because I don’t live here”, while I was actually helping her with rent they weren’t doing anything for was insane.

I kept visiting her almost daily, spending time in the one small 5x5m room she had for herself, even though it was two hour train ride. During covid, I was mostly staying at her place, and since she loved animals (her mother worked at a zoo, before cancer got her), we discussed what we want to get, and pet racoon was high on the list. And when she said that we will get a racoon once we live together, I immediately found a flat in my city, and we moved in together around 5 years ago. We stole the ashes of her mother and went no-contact with the people living at her old flat. They can burn in hell.

Unfortunately, racoons are not easily legal to own, but we got a lot of different animals instead. She also helped me with starting to make our own goth events, DJ, and help local promoters, and now we’re responsible for more than half of goth events that happen in our city. She’s now earning more that I do (and I work in IT), and I’m really happy how did everything turned out. We have no idea how did the rest of her familly end up, but we don’t really care.

We are kind of planning a wedding, with only witnesses, but so far what’s stopping is that I can’t find my birth certificate, and that it looks like it’s not possible for both of us to have both surnames (the options are one of us keeps theirs, and the other get’s both, or we choose one only, and we both want to have both), so we kind of didn’t want to bother with it for a while.

I sent her a dick pic

!There’s a lot more to the story, but that’s the essence of it. I do not recommend it to anyone unless you were in the same circumstances as we were!<