The End of My Adventures in Online Dating

After I took a break from online dating right before the pandemic, neither you nor I, dear reader, thought I would be making a wedding announcement afterwards.

My new husband likes that I haven’t written much about him (since my online dating adventures focused mainly on the bad experiences), but here’s a *very* brief overview of how we got here.

Twenty years ago, we met. (I don’t remember him much from way back then.) In 2011, he got back in touch with me on Facebook. I figured he had a crush, but didn’t think much of it. We were in sporadic contact after that. He especially wanted to try to figure out how my awful dating adventures could be made less awful (was there a way to get terrible guys to stop being terrible? No.) and to make suggestions about how to handle my chronic ailments.

When the pandemic hit, I watched him, a first responder (AEMT) argue with all his friends and family on Facebook, furious on his behalf that they would deny the reality of the threat we all faced. When he got Covid (before the vaccines were available), he wrote to me to confess his love.

I told him to back off, for many reasons: a) I was enjoying my break from dating; b) he was entirely too far away (6 hours); c) he had a girlfriend.

And, reader, he did.

Then, in the late Spring 2022, I started to think about dating again. Coincidentally, my AEMT and I had another Facebook conversation. He didn’t have a steady girlfriend anymore (though he was dating a few people), so I told him it was okay to now have dirty thoughts about me.

He talked me into letting him drive down for a date.

There were a couple of weeks between the agreement and him driving down. I gave him permission to wax romantic–and he did. It takes a lot of courage to woo a writing teacher with writing. But he did–and I fell in love.

That date went on for three days. On the first day, he pledged his troth, as they say, and forsook all others.

We saw each other whenever he could drive down, but at the end of the summer, I had to head to Dublin to teach.

At the end of the quarter, he joined me there and proposed (I’ll share that romantic story another time).

And even though I don’t like living with men, and even though I didn’t ever see myself getting married again, I accepted, because he told me we never had to formalize it, we didn’t have to live together, and if we did live together, but I hated it, we could stop living together but still stay in a relationship.

He gets me: all of me.

He also loves all of me, my weirdness and silliness and stubbornness.

And he’s romantic in both of the important ways: in the flowers and poetry way and in the “hey, you said your knees hurt whenever you have to dig in the back of the fridge, so I got you a pad to put down” way.

Though he says I broke my rule about not dating people who live far away, may I present that I never drove the 6 hours to see him, which other men certainly would have expected me to do, and that he moved down here as soon as he could.

Our friend Michael recently invited us to his house in Guatemala, with the hint that he’s ordained. So we eloped in a beautiful place with kind people. Now we’re back, and we’ve filed the paperwork, and so there is officially a Mr. Dr. Karma, god(dess) help him.