Our Love Story- Part 2: Many keystrokes and clicks of the mouse later…

From the very first email from ‘Sell_Dude” (that was his screen name, he was the manager of a car dealership at the time) I had this uneasy feeling in my stomach that I was about to take a giant leap without a safety net or harness. I had a feeling that if I was willing, I was about to embark on a crazy and unexplainable journey.

Maybe that’s why I put him off, avoided him and was carefully evasive, that makes sense right?

Our emails to each other got longer and more heartfelt with every exchange. I would read excerpts of our interactions aloud to my Dad and say:

This guy’s not for real right? He can’t possibly be this perfect? He has to be embellishing, putting on a show or SOMETHING. I have to stop conversing with this guy he’s way to good to be true; I have to put an end to this; I’m not going to write back.

Dad would say:

Maybe he IS for real, maybe he is perfect for you, maybe he’s exactly who he says he is, write him back, you owe it to yourself to write him back.

Note to my husband: You owe your father-in-law BIG TIME!

Note to myself: Don’t let yourself get in the way of YOUR SELF, learn to go with the flow a little more.

If it wasn’t for my Father’s encouragement I likely would have chickened out and missed out on an opportunity of a lifetime.

We started emailing each other in late October; finally in December I let Sell_Dude talk me into taking the next step; the phone. When I look back now I can’t believe that I made him wait 2 months to even speak to me on the phone, and I can’t believe that he stuck around long enough to do so.

We would talk on the phone for exorbitant amounts of time, and even then I thought he was still too good to be true. I found out that we knew people in common (which is likely when you grow up in a small city where everyone knows everyone), so I contacted them and asked them questions about Sell_Dude, looking to confirm everything he had told me about himself, I googled him, I called his employer to ask if he worked there, I did everything short of hiring and private investigator.

Once he got me on the phone, he began to persist towards the next step, an actual date. I lied; I made up excuses and pretended I had an incredibly busy social life.

Now it is evident to me that I was terrified, afraid to fall in love, afraid to let go and freefall, scared to trust. At the time I just kept telling myself that I was just protecting my heart, because no one is that perfect, there was no way anyone could live up to the person that he had painted in my mind.

So I dragged that out too, to the point where it was time to get off the fence and pick a side. I dragged my feet so long; I could feel he was starting to loose patience with me. So I agreed to go on a date, our first date was going to be Saturday January 14^th. He wanted to take me to Toronto for our first date, so that we could go to The Boat Show and have dinner atop the CN Tower in the revolving restaurant.

I said to him:

Are you crazy? I’m not getting in the car with a complete stranger and drive 2 hours to Toronto for a first date.

He said:

I’m not a complete stranger, I’m a good person and completely safe.

Me:

That may be true, but how do I know that?

So we compromised and settled on going for lunch… locally. But we never did make it to lunch on Saturday January 14^th 2006.

To be continued…

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Next: Our Love Story- Part 3: The First Date

Tagged as: dating, love, online dating