BE and I met in an unconventional way, but now looking back I guess it fits us!
I had been in a few long-term relationships that had all turned out badly (abuse, cheating, etc) and so had decided officially to give up, swear off men, and resign myself to the life of "single mom to one large dog". One of my friends from back home in Georgia told me that I was doing a terrible job of picking men and so therefore was no longer allowed to do it myself. And so there came to be a profile for me using my Facebook information on a site I'd never heard of. Which quickly filled up in three days with over 60 messages and "winks" (whatever those are). Frustrated with my friend for getting me into this mess, I attempted to make the best of it and started answering all those dumb little questions they ask you (I'll admit, some of them were pretty fun). Little did I know that 6.5 hours away, BE was also sitting frustrated at his computer on the same site that he had been using for a while out of sheer boredom, but hadn't met a single person worth asking out twice on. So he decided on a whim to change his settings, and expand his search area outside of NC to the whole country, but also to search by percentage matched on answered questions. States away in AL, I popped up in his top three for the whole country in the search results. We matched over 99%. Intrigued, he decided to send me a message. Back in AL, I got that message, and it was the first in all the ones I'd read that wasn't a novel explaining why I should respond. Short, sweet, and to the point. I was sold. We spoke for a long time on the site, realized soon after that we were the only people we were talking to, and deleted our accounts. We had moved on to Facebook (big step, I know). After that, I finally gave him my number and told him he could text me. Almost immediately, I got my first text (man that boy was on it!!) and that went on for about a week until he ASKED MY PERMISSION to call me. Seriously? Is this guy real?? I obliged and we ended up on the phone 7 hours.
A few weeks later I was up pulling an all-nighter for a huge test I had the next morning, and around midnight I called BE to talk to him for a while. At one point I made the random comment, "man, I really wish you were here." Little did I know, after we hung up he got back out of bed, got dressed, packed a bag, and got in his car. Six hours later right as I was getting ready to leave for my test, he shows up at my door and says, "You said you wished I was here, and I realized I wished I was here too, and I wanted to tell you good luck on your test." And that, my friends, was the beginning.
He moved in with me in late summer of last year so that we could get time before he was supposed to leave for Officer Training School (OTS) with the Air Force, which originally got scheduled for September (...then moved to November...then moved to January). We talked marriage because at the time our next duty station wouldn't allow either him to live off base as an unmarried officer or me to live on base with him as a dependent. But we both knew that we wanted to be together, so we started talking weddings. We went and looked at rings and realized that our dreams of waiting til the next summer to have a big wedding were shot if we wanted to be in Florida together by April. We really did toy with the idea of Vegas (sometimes I still think that would have been super fun... but only if I could have gotten an Elvis impersonator), but we ended up driving up into the Smokies in Gatlinburg, TN one gorgeous day in November and were married on a deck built out over the ledge of a mountain. We only had our immediate families and a few close friends there, and it ended up being wonderful.
