Miss Yvonne Meets Captain Carl: Part 1

April is Anniversary month for the Captain and me. We'll be married six years on the 19th, and have been together nine years total. After I posted my engagement story last month, I had several (three!) requests to tell the story of how Captain Carl and I met. And because I love to talk about myself and secretly want to be just like The Pioneer Woman only dirtier, I decided to post our story in installments. Get ready for a mildly entertaining story that will go on and on until I'm tired of writing about it. You're totally excited about this, I can feel it. Or maybe you just have indigestion. Meh, whichever.

I moved to Texas from Minnesota in 1999, and yes we did party like it was the current year, just as Prince predicted. One of my sister's lived in Dallas and had extended an open invitation to come stay with her after my almost-marriage fell apart. I spent two years debating what to do with my life, then I got over myself and figured why the hell not? and moved down here.

A few months later, a friend from back home came down for a visit. She was right in the middle of dating a guy she met online. This was back before eharmony and matchdotcom existed and internet dating was still a relatively new and novel idea. This friend was very adventurous and insisted that I try it. So I set up a profile on Yahoo personals - it was free back then - and I went shopping. Yeah, the losers were flying fast and furious on the old interwebs. I had no idea so many men enjoyed long walks on the beach at sunset and romantic dinners by candlelight.....I'm pretty sure there were a few pina colada references thrown in there too. Boring. It was like they all copied text out of a book titled "How To Say What Women Want To Hear, And Get Laid Every Time". I was fast losing my interest in looking for a date.

But then there was an ad that caught my eye. It was different. It was funny. It was well written. It had correct grammar and spelling! The guy who wrote it had turned his ad into a used car advertisement, and it was brilliant. "One owner, low mileage, reliable, no rust." Here was a man with a sense of humor, who probably wasn't taking this online dating thing too seriously.

He was the only person that I emailed. No one else interested me. I was crazy nervous once I sent my message. He could be a psycho serial killer! He could be a deranged identity thief! He could be a sex maniac! Wait, that last one wouldn't be so bad...

He wrote back quickly and we began an email friendship. I never gave him my real name, we never spoke on the phone. I was so scared that he could be a raving lunatic, I kept all identifying details about myself a secret. We didn't even have pictures of each other. Neither of us owned a digital camera because it was totally like the dark ages back then, so we had to settle for physical description of ourselves in words only.

He was so funny and I got excited about him very quickly. And then he stopped writing back. Just like that, he disappeared. I waited several days after my last email before sending another one....I didn't want to seem desperate. But he didn't reply to the next one either. And because I'm not an idiot, I gave up. He obviously lost interest and since I didn't even know his real name, there was no point in asking him why.

So for a few weeks, I logged onto Yahoo and checked out the new ads. Nobody caught my eye....nobody was as funny as he was. And so I quit looking. Until two months later, when I decided to try one more time.

...to be continued.

You can hardly wait to read more, right?