Someday your prince will come

After several months of the online dating service thing, I cancelled my subscription and decided to give it a rest. Then, on Sunday afternoon, October 3, 1999 I was feeling particularly sorry for myself so I signed up for the 7-day free trial just for the heck of it. I browsed through the profiles and found six men who looked interesting. I had read the profile for one of them before, but he lived 15 miles from me and I didn’t want to go that far. However, this was a last-ditch effort so I thought, what the heck, I’ll throw him into the mix. His name was Ed and he had nice eyes.

I had decided that this would be it for the year. The last thing I wanted was to meet someone so close to the holidays because then you have the whole “oh, crap, now I have to buy him a Christmas gift” thing and I just didn’t want to deal with that. I figured, at the most, I might meet someone and have a couple of fun dates before the holidays and that would be it until January.

I wrote to all six guys and five wrote back that evening – including Ed who immediately asked for a photo (he’d has his fill of meeting unseen women). So I sent him his danged photo and also wrote back to three of the others. Monday Ed wrote and said that he didn’t like to spend too much time on the e-mail thing so how about just meeting for coffee. Sounded a little pushy, but I agreed so we found a Starbucks halfway between us and met there on Tuesday, October 5th.

As I drove to the rendezvous spot I remember thinking to myself, “What the heck am I doing? This is so stupid. Oh, well, an hour from now it will be all over and I can go back to my quiet life.” I parked my car and a man drove up and parked in front of me. I took a deep breath and said “shit”. We got out of our cars and walked towards each other. “You must be Ed.” “You must be Sandi.” We shook hands and walked in to get coffee. Poor dear was so nervous that he ordered regular coffee and, trust me, the man cannot drink caffeine after 2:00 pm!! I heard from him later that he was up all that night – and it wasn’t from excitement at meeting me!

We talked, and talked. Laughed, found out we had a lot in common – mainly around family values. Each had grown kids around the same ages. Each has elderly parents that we were close to. And he had a look and sparkle in his eyes that I hadn’t seen in anyone else. This one was definitely worth a second date!

After a while, Ed started rocking back a forth a little bit (I’ve since learned that he does this when he’s nervous about something) and said, “This is the awkward part.” I said, “Would you like to see each other again?” He said, “YES!!” So we made a movie and dinner date for that Friday night and the rest, as they say, is history.

Two years later, on October 5th, he proposed and in 2002, on October 5th, we got married. All because I was in a really pissy mood one October afternoon…..