When I was in middle school, the techy kid walked up to me with a piece of metal in his hand and said, hey, did you know you can take out this part of a lighter and use it as a taser? I thought he was cool and immediately took a liking to him. Turns out we took the same train to school, and soon enough we'd share our train rides. Soon after, he started staying over at my place. One day he was chilling on my bed and installed something on his laptop called "Mandriva Linux". This is the day I met GNU/Linux <3

I worked with her older sister for a couple years, perfectly content being single. One day, randomly blurted out that I hated being single. Her sister asked me to describe what I wanted, I said a few things, and “You just described my sister! Let me introduce you.”

Apparently, she had already thought we would be perfect together. That was 16 years ago, and we’ve been married for almost 13. I could not ask for a more perfect person to have as my wife and dearest friend.

Over the internet, like a normal person.

1. Posted sexy xkcd to my blog.
2. She commented.
3. ???
4. We're married and have two awesome kids.

I walked into Katz's Delicatessen and ordered the pastrami reuben. One bite later and I knew my life would never be the same.

The year: around 1994. I was 14 or 15 and using a borrowed account on a local collage network. A student there shared his modem pool login info with his friend who was also my friend and he shared it with me. My first taste of unix was a DEC minicomputer in some cs professors office. I learned a lot of the ins and outs of unix and the internet... 2400 baud for pirating software and porn mostly. Eventually random ftp sites and netnews got boring and redundant. I got introduced to irc and was amazed at the instant interaction with other computer people. My friend at the time hung out in a specific channel, #chitchat2, and I joined it as well because why not. It was a pretty tight knit group of regulars that hung out there and talked about whatever... Nothing in particular. At 15 I felt pretty accepted by people for the first time in my life.

Being the budding wanna be hacker and scriptkiddie I also hung out in all the warez channels, #exceed, #ego, #warez, etc, and picked up on irc scripts and whatnot. SrFrog and his seminal lice script was my favorite of the time. I learned about patching and compiling a customer version of the standard unix irc client, and ran lice. It was pretty fun to mess with people and being 15 and relatively immature I spent hours riding server splits and nick-colliding people for the hell of it. There were some dicks that hung out in #chitchat2 so I did what I could to make their life hell. Looking back I was probably as much of an asshole and they were insufferable IT twits.

I also met a girl there who was in college in another state. She remembers me as being a gigantic asshole and super immature. She hated me and would refuse to talk to me. Over the next 4 years I grew up, turned my script kiddie nature into an actual passion for computer security. As I grew she and i became sort-of friends.

Eventually, when I was around 19, my family moved across the country, and she graduated college and moved the other way across the country to be with her family. We started talking more and more on irc, private chats, late into the night. Out of the blue she called me on the phone which blew my mind. I had dated on and off but this is the first time I ever had a member of the opposite sex who I felt was actually interested in me. One call turned in to once a week, then to several times a week. I had to get a job so I could pay for 400 dollar a month long distance bills (this was the mid to late 90s and I never invested time in the phreaking skills I probably should have). One day she sent me a message "I bought a plane ticket and am coming to visit you in 2 weeks".

My heart exploded on the spot. I spent the two weeks saving what cash I could, I found a hotel for her to stay at (my parents were cool but not cool enough to let her stay with us, she was some random anonymous person I met on the computer, as they put it... Stopping short of calling her an axe murderer).

The day arrived and I met her at the airport at the gate. You could do that then. It was then, at 19.5 that I knew I was in love for real, not just in lust or in dire need of companionship. Our next week together was a blur of every: passion, incredible sex, amazing conversations, and our souls connecting on a level so deep I didn't know such a connection was possible. It went way too fast and seemed to last a life time all at the same time. We even spent some time on irc talking with all our combined friends in #chitchat2. By the end of our time together, we knew we had to be together. I brought her to the airport and walked her to the gate. We were both sobbing but she promised that her next step was getting her shit together and she was going to move to where I lived.

The next 6 weeks was arduous. It might as well have been 6 years. But in August of 1996, she packed her bags and flew across the country. She lived alone for a couple of years until I had issues with my family and I moved in with her. 4 years after moving to be near me we got married.

Tomorrow, April 28th will be our 24th year wedding anniversary. It hasn't always been easy but I can't imagine spending my life with anyone else.

As for the love of my life, tru64 lead to Solaris, led to slackware linux, Debian, ubuntu, Arch, etc. my lifelong love of unix and unix like operating systems started 30+ years ago with tru64 and I wouldn't change it for the world.

Just kidding.... It's my wife that is the love of my life. We met "on that damn computer" as my mother likes to put it. Every year on our anniversary we go to where we had our first irl date. I sometimes pop back into efnet on irc to see if anyone has returned to #chitchat2 but so far haven't found anyone. I'm still friends with, and grateful to the guy who gave me access to the colleges modem pool.

Ok Cupid (but this was 10+ years ago, I hear it's gotten shittier since then 🙁)

Renaissance Faire, 1999, in northern California. She was a wench, I was a german mercenary (Landsknecht). It was lust and love at first sight. Four kids later, misfortune and death, and I'm still here, mourning her all these years later.

Her character murdered my character in a MUD.

About a decade ago, I was renting a room from a couple I was friends with. One of them went to a hairstylist and during the appointment said to her "I don't have any girl-friends, do you want to hang out some time?". Well that hairstylist said yes and they made plans to go snow tubing a few weeks later. I was supposed to go with them but came down with a cold. I still wanted to meet this new girl so I came down to see them off. That's when I met the woman that would eventually become my wife and the mother of my child!

I had never been more upset that I was sick than that day lol

So I was at a dungeon and overheard two women lamenting the lack of lesbians in the local community. I then walked over and said “hi I’m a lesbian” to the both of them. Anyways I’m married to one of them now somehow.

I worked at a college bar for beer money. Her friends came in all the time, she did not. Then one night she did, and I was literally struck dumb - just like the stories. There was a few months of seeing her here and there, a few conversations - I had never met a woman so amazing. I was a bug, and she a goddess in every way. Imagine my shock when she handed me a napkin with her phone number on it and said “call me sometime.”

You bet your ass I called her the very next day. That was 28 years ago. The crazy part is things got steadily better over the years. Nothing got “boring” it got more exciting. Looks fade, but she’s more beautiful to me today than ever. Kids didn’t drag us down, they made things more fun. Bills and chores and life’s troubles became something we worked through together - teaching us that we can overcome just about anything and be successful. I’d argue all of our success is because we’re a team.

We truly hit the love lottery when both of us were “done” and didn’t believe something like what we have is possible. Put away your baggage, and keep an open mind - your napkin could be handed to you today.

I didn't.

I was a lazy jerk that just bombed out of the local college in record time. I figured I'd try photography trade school. She was a natural artist with no plan and picked the same trade school. We were in the same 6-month program. She specialized in lab work, I went into product photography. Class started October 1984. We had several family deaths, financial ruin, and other calamities - but supported each other through it all. Lived with family and in the car. Got my life on track in my 30s. Bought a house in 2000, married in 2004, kid in 2009. Now a boring but desperate suburbanite staring down the next downsizing wave and big medical bills.

I looked in the mirror.

Kinda kidding, I have not found anyone for longterm but I learned to be ok with it and stop hating myself.

On a drunk Thursday night out noticed my bike wasn’t where I thought I left it. Decided to steal a bike myself on my way home. A week later, again on Thursday night, ran into this girl and had a great time. She didn’t have a bike so I offered to bring her home. While getting closer to her house, I started to recognise the area… this is where I stole the bike. Asked her what happened to hers (legit question, everybody has a bike in the Netherlands) . Told me hers got stolen the week before. I started to feel awkward when we stopped exactly at the place where I had stolen the bike. Apparently this was where she lived. Told her this was where I grabbed a bike a week before. She looked at the bike, and I shit you not, it was hers. I hooked up with the girl that I stole a bike from. Fast forward a year and a half later, decided I do not believe in “Meant to be” shit and broke up with her. Some time later I meet a different girl, the love of my live… this is 20 years ago now, we’re now expecting our first kid.

The foster agency told my mom I was ready to be picked up, and the rest is history.

My ex-fiancee and ex-girlfriend for 7 years was getting hit on by our boss. She used to brag to me about it. They started texting back and forth until suddenly she wanted to "just be friends" with me (which entitled "benefits").

This was all about a month before our wedding. So naturally I declined being "friends" and slept with her bride's maid. We decided the sex was good enough to try dating.

That was 12 years ago now.

I was at a going away party for a friend when I overheard her at the bar talking to someone about The Human Centipede. I thought, "No fucking way," and immediately walked over geeked out about the movie for a bit with her. I owe my marriage to that movie.

It was fifteen years ago today!

I had gone to ride the Critical Mass two days prior on a whim, where I ran into a friend of a friend from college and we ended up riding home together and getting to know one another. He took a bomb picture of my skinny ass having pensively out over Lake Michigan under the lamplight. We split up and I thought that was it, other than him messaging me the photo.

It was not it! April 27, I'm sitting outside Bridgeport Coffeehouse, trying to get some work done on my laptop. Who comes up behinde but this very guy! He explains that he and his girlfriend were supposed to be going on some kind of tour of the stockyards for a class, but couldn't find it and they happened to drive past me, and could they check their email on my laptop? Of course I said yes, but it turns out they had very much missed the tour. So they invite me to hang out and I jump in the car with them.

And we're driving around just exploring the South Side, stopping whenever we see something interesting, talking and giving and having a great time. The last thing we stopped for was some guys painting a mural on the side of a bar. The artist and his assistants and the film crew recording them explain that the mural is part of a local art festival (Versionfest, for those familiar with the Chicago arts scene) and there's a whole expo of artists around the corner, and a party and concert to close out the festival that evening.

And this was no highschool art fair. There was some great stuff on display, printers and tinkers and jugglers and painters and the kind of people who generally know where to get heavy-duty explosives at any given time. My new buddy and his girlfriend split back home and I go back to my house, just around the corner at this point, to eat something and put on party clothes.

We've all been to that party, right, where everyone seems to know each other but you don't know anybody? Some hate it, some thrive, and me? I was already having the best weekend of my life at this point, I'm absolutely jamming. I meet all sorts of cool toms and mollys in this rambling old house-turned-community-centre and finally I step out onto this giant porch on the upper level.

And there's this one young woman, all by herself, smoking a cigarette while everyone else is huddled in little groups having animated conversations. I think to myself, Hey.

I bet I can bum a cigarette off her.

I swear to you that's all I had on mind. At this point in life, I was barely out of homelessness, all my friends had dated each other and broken each other's hearts; and I had gone from being wrecked by my own exto failing to date a bunch of friends of friends, to finally getting ready to move away to another city and form a new, hopefully less incestuous, friend group and, more importantly, swearing off women.

That's always when I meet the next one.

So anyway, I swagger over to her and say, Hey, I was over there not talking to anybody and I saw you were over here not talking to anybody, and that just seemed awfully ineffecient.

Now I'm going to backtrack and tell her side of the story. It starts when she was six years old but that's personal and not mine to tell, but cutting a long story short she saw Grant Lee Phillips in concert and the opening band was a local singer-songwriter who she instantly became a huge fan of. He was headlining the concert at the art festival and she was there to see him, thinking it was at a normal venue with a bar and not a weird house with two guys selling loose high lifes out of a cooler. She was the only other person there who didn't know everybody else there, and had already called her best girlfriend to come hang out and maybe hit on the musician.

And they she saw this gorgeous, cool-as-hell guy step out onto the porch. He looked around, then walked straight up to her and said, "Hey. I was over there not talking to anybody and I saw you were over here not talking to anybody, and that just seemed awfully ineffecient."

Swoon city, she told me later.

So she texts her friend with new mission parameters. No more concert buddy, it's serious wingwoman time. By the time the girlfriend gets there, we're deep in conversation, and my blind ass is just happy to have made a new friend my own age.

To spare the more personal details, the wingwoman winged it, we all ended up back at my place, the girlfriend and the musician split off after we all broke into a construction site at one am for giggles, and my new friend let me know she wanted to be more than friends. She had ogled my Chekov's profile pic with the brooding and the lakeshore and the lamplight while surreptitiously scoping my socials and liked what she saw.

The next day we had our first date. The next week our second, seeing the same band that brought us together. Three months later she proposed; a year after that we were married. It's been a hell of a ride.

AOL, in a chat room, about 22 years ago.

Online dating, but we met in 2016 and I heard stuff has gone downhill since.

Just under half of the people I dated seriously (eg: not a hookup) as an adult, I met online.

Local gaming store. I joined one of the tabletop rpgs. We talked a lot after this. He had cats which endeared me to him. I met his cats. His cats liked me. He also had a trashcan in the bathroom so I knew he was smart. We've been together uhhhh 17 years this December I think.

Hanging on the wall of my local guitar store about 15 years ago.

I posted on r/incels and she DMed me.

True story.

Back in the days of non-ironic MySpace, I used it to promote my band and my now husband was one of the people I contacted. A few days after that, we ran into each other at a local bar in line for the bathroom. I got his contact info and asked him out on a date. We've been together since.

In an acting class. I didn't notice her but she noticed me. Next class she switched from dressing tom boyish to more feminine and I noticed her. 20 years later and we just had our second kid.

She was a direct report at my job.

At a bdsm club.

Spotted her across the way. She spotted me when I struck up a conversation with the boyfriend of her bff.

Here we are 6 years later married.

Good times.

Obscure Pokemon shipping tag on Tumblr

I was late for work, and I had forgotten to brush my teeth. So I ran into the sundry shop to buy a roll of Lifesavers, and she was behind the counter.

Little did I know at the time, but she would save my life in a lot more ways than just by making my breath smell better.

~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~

The old fashioned way: college/Facebook/pirating music as a favor.