True Romance

On Friday, I asked you all to guess which two of my sneaky statements were true and, more importantly, which one was the lie. Rather than give away the answer today, I thought I would draw this out a wee bit by helping to narrow down the field.

One of the odder bits of truth from Friday’s post was option two: my husband and I met in a computer lab. Of course, that’s only the truth by the narrowest of margins since we were in computer labs in different cities. Heck we were even different countries.

One of the best-kept secrets in the history of Hubby and Typ0 is that we met on the Internet, in an IRC chatroom. We like to tell people that we “met through mutual friends” and that isn’t technically a lie since the people on our IRC channel were online friends whom both we knew.

Here, for those of you who asked is a brief take on the truth of the courtship of Typ0 and Hubby. Back then I was still Typo and Hubby was better known as echobelly. In January of 1995, the Internet was nothing like it is today. I don’t want to whitewash the past but the ‘net was a far more innocent place back then. Meeting people from online wasn’t dangerous like it is today.

Our IRC channel was devoted to music but we were known to get up to all sorts of crazy high jinx. On January 10th of that year the “floofmobile” went crazy and those of us who were online had to “hide.” And that is how it all began. Echobelly sent me a /private message and I responded. Before I knew it, we were exchanging real names and regular emails. Before long, we started “talk”ing (another early days application). By the end of the school year, we had graduated to snail mail and talking on the phone.

This is where I get to admit how lame I am because during this entire time, I thought echobelly and I were simply good friends and that he had a crush on my friend, SGH. So when he invited himself to my parents’ house in Toronto, I didn’t think twice about including SGH in on all the fun.

My parents were oddly astute and cool about the whole thing. Echobelly stayed in our guestroom, which meant that I wouldn’t be rushing off to meet my strange Internet friend at his hotel. We were also incredibly well supervised… for the most part.

When I opened the door on August 25th I saw a tall, lanky guy on the other side and I thought, “He’s taller than I thought.” I’m still not sure what his first thoughts were. (Hubby Edit: I think it was, "She's shorter than I thought.") Within an hour, the amazing camaraderie we had developed online and over the phone had translated itself to real life and we were chatting like long lost friends.

By the end of the evening, I finally figured out that echobelly had a crush on me. Me! I’d had no idea and hadn’t even hoped for such a thing. SGH is hot and that must be who he wanted to crush on. Echobelly finally got it through my thick skull by kissing me on the ugly blue couch in the basement.

He pulled back from the kiss and asked if I was going to hit him. Umm.. No.

And that, my Friends, is the brief story of how the man I now call Hubby and I met. We met in a computer lab. I told him I loved him in a computer lab. And he told me I was his best friend in a computer lab. And that’s the truth.

Check back in tomorrow when I narrow down the list yet again!