How I met you mother

Sons, I know you are too little to read this, and way too young to understand it, but here it is, how I met you mother.

We met online. Now I know that in this day and age, this is not something of note, but we didn't meet in this day and age. We met online in 1997, a long time before it was common place to fall in love with someone you never met. In the past, people had pen pals, then there was telephone dating, but then the internet happened and boy did it happen. Suddenly chat rooms were the new singles bars with more and more chatters looking for Mr or Mrs Right, or at least Mr or Mrs Right Now.

Its funny but at the time I wasn't looking for anything, having just gotten out of a previous relationship that had started online. Your mother was in a similar situation although for her it was more recent.

We sat down under a table (virtually of course) and talked about music. It wasn't a long converstation but there was something there. We exchanged e-mail addresses (kinda like giving out your telephone number) and carried on with our lives.

We began e-mailing each other every day. I believe in my second ever e-mail to her, I said "Wouldn't it be funny if we ended up married". Ha Ha Ha.

Its strange that while we knew of each other in the chat room for some time, we had never actually really gotten to know each other, I guess mainly because, if truth be told, I was a pretty uncaring, annoying and chasing anything in a skirt. How times have changed……….

As well as exchanging e-mails and instant messages, we called each other. Do you know how expensive this was? In Britain at the time, you paid for local phone calls (which was the internet) as well as all other calls. It didn't matter at the time, the person in Canada was more important than money by this point.

In the January of 1998, your mother came to visit me, and we had a great couple of weeks. I missed her a lot when she went back home so I booked a flight to Canada for the last two weeks of March.

Now you have to remember that I didn't know what the weather was like in Canada. One weekend it snowed, the next was a heat wave. It was very different to Britain.

It was the first Friday of my stay that I nearly made a monumental mistake. Faced with mounting phone bills, and a long and costly commute if I wanted nookie, I didn't see a future for us. I can still remember the table we were sitting at, in the Ponderosa resturant in Niagara Falls. Something in my body language gave away the secret and upset your mother. Luckily at this point I realised I had to take a chance on something. The fact that we had a hotel room with a huge jaccuzi had no influence on my decision.

Its funny that I can remember the walk back to the hotel, holding hands as the ice pellets came down. Waking up in the morning, seeing two foot of snow on the ground helped me decide what I wanted and where.

I got back to Cardiff and we continued calling each other, trying to work out the details of when, where and why. We set a date, and where we would do it, and also where we would live afterwards. October 2nd 1998, Canada.

I think I made the right decision.