If I had a beer for every time that I have been asked how I met Robin I could give all of Ireland a large hangover! With that in mind, our fairytale unfolds below:
How we met!
Once upon a time there was a drunk at a keyboard in the Falkland Islands. That drunk was me. I had been sent a link to an online personality test and, wondering what they would make of me, I took it. Having found that they were fairly close in their evaluation, I then found that I had inadvertently joined an online dating service! I added a comment about Penguins and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, Robin had done much the same a few months previously. Having tired of the service, she went to delete her entry. Before she did so, she had a last tinker with it and found my entry. Reading that I had a website 'if you can be bothered' she checked it out and, thoroughly amused, left me a message on the dating site. Weeks passed by...... Late one night, after another dose of beer, I was fooling online, looking for acquaintances in the chatrooms. None found, I started to look through my favourites and found the dating service. 'I'll delete my entry' I thought, but when I got there, the cupboard was not bare! Robin's message was waiting for me. I sent a quick note back. It turned out that she had become tired of waiting for a reply and had gone back to delete her entry when my message appeared! After a flurry of notes two and fro', we hooked up using MSMessenger. This was on March 11th. On March 17th we talked for the first time. The next day Robin proposed to me during a conversation on a quite different subject. I said OK and carried on talking only to wonder a few minutes later, if I had misheard what she had said. I hadn't and we were engaged! I doubt if it would have taken much longer if she had needed to wait for me to pop the question but she is the impatient one of us and she beat me to it! I handed in my notice and left the Falklands on 'Liberation Day' - June 14th. I landed in Minneapolis on June 18th. A month to the day, we picked up our wedding rings. Another month to the day, we were wed in our back garden - August 18th 2001. So there you have it. An online romance, a one way trip of approx' 13000 miles, a small wedding and everyone living happily ever after! Of course things are never quite that simple. Three weeks after the wedding, with my papers in to the immigration authorities, some tripped-out rag-heads hit the World Trade Center and Robin lost her job. The first of these events made the immigration process take six times longer than it would have before. The second, combined with the effects of the first, meant that my savings from the Falklands were spent in ways other than planned. I'm thankfull that we had the money though, it gave us the opportunity to have our first year together with few financial worries. As the money ran out, my papers came through and I am now working. Robin was able to take advantage of a Government program that paid to send her to the local technical college where she is heading towards the end of a 2 year degree course in Graphic Design and Printing with perfect grades! Happy ever after? The World can throw whatever problems at us as it sees fit. It wont bother us, we have each other and that is all that really matters. If we were to lose everything, we could just walk South till we got somewhere warm and live under a tree, we'll still be together. Yes we are, and will always be, happy! Homepage