"How did you meet?"

   Some of you may not know this but James and I met online. It wasn't a dating site either. We met completely by chance. This is my side of the story.

October 4, 2005
   I had just joined Myspace.com. At the time, Myspace had a spot on the homepage where they featured two random users who just joined. They called it "Cool New People". This is the first time I ever saw James.

still gives me butterflies

   So mysterious. I was in a good mood and felt spontaneous. I clicked on his profile and messaged him something along the lines of "Hi... you and your guitar are gorgeous... LOL...I just wanted to say hello. I hope you're smiling...Mandy".

What I didn't know at the time was that he was bombarded with hundreds of messages and friend requests from random people. I'm not exaggerating this. I'm pretty sure it was around 500. James said he slowly but surely replied to all of them.

   I got home from work the next day and I'm checking my messages... He messaged me back!
"Hi Mandy, you're quite gorgeous yourself with rock solid taste in music...". I can't remember what else was said but that was definitely the first thing he ever wrote me. I assumed people usually ignore strange messages from people they don't know. Especially people who live in a different state. I was genuinely surprised he wrote back.

   Over the next few months we chatted back and forth, getting to know each other. The messages became more and more frequent and I started to realize I was falling for this guy. We met for the first time in March of 2006. In August of that year, we said those three little words. Shortly after we became official, I remember chatting with him online one night. My mom was in the room, watching TV and I sighed out loud and said, 

"Mom, I'm going to marry this man".