Todays’ blog is dedicated to my wife.
It’s our three year wedding anniversary today, so it’s a good time to do it.
Especially as I’m sick with a virus that has torn my throat up pretty nicely.
You could say it’s a real pain in the neck. *Ba dum tiss*
It also makes it hard to concentrate on just about anything else!
I first met my wife back when she wasn’t my wife.
It’s crazy, I know!
We met on the first day of high school, because we were in the same class, a class that was named after her.
We didn’t become friends, we barely spoke, but she stood out because of her name.
I didn’t really look at girls romantically back then, because they were just other people to me.
How horrible, I know!
I was kind of a late bloomer to the whole love thing anyway.
I’d always had both male and female friends growing up, so it wasn’t really anything different to want to hang out with girls.
This eventually changed when the hormones kicked in, and then I just couldn’t talk to girls.
They were just too darn pretty!
Years passed and while our paths didn’t cross much, we were still in a lot of the same classes for things that weren’t electives.
Then one of my best friends started seeing one of her best friends, and our groups started to slowly intermingle.
Yet still nothing happened for years.
It wasn’t until I had my heart ripped out and stomped on by my first girlfriend that I finally had enough courage to try going after this girl I had a crush on at high school.
To be fair, that wasn’t a short list… but she was at the top of that list.
This was a little over 10 years ago.
I hated social media back then.
“I will never have a Facebook account!” were words I would say with conviction.
But my first GF wanted to be able to show me off on Facebook, so she made me an account I never wanted to use.
Until I had no friends left and really needed some.
So, you know that cliche: “Bros before hoes.”
While being slightly offensive, it actually rings true.
It turns out that if you give up everything and everyone to be with only one person… it’s really bad!
That person then becomes your whole world, and it puts a lot of pressure on their shoulders.
And when you’re just stupid young kids, it usually ends badly.
So after that ship crashed and burned, it left me without any friends.
Thankfully I have awesome friends, who welcomed me back.
And Facebook was a huge help with that.
It also let me reconnect with some of the people from high school.
There I reconnected with my wife.
There were many signs we would make a great couple, and everyone that knew both of us could see it.
We just didn’t know it at the time.
This was shortly after my break up and I was still not in the right frame of mind.
I then happened to listen to a song by Cake called “Is This Love?“
And it felt like the song was for me, and I realised I wasn’t in love with my ex and it was time to move on.
So I finally gathered up my courage like I was in the anime Monster Rancher and I asked my friend if he could get his partner to invite her over.
Real brave, I know!
But they did, and when the Vegeta Final Flash/Super Saiyan theme started up as her ringtone, I knew she was the one.
But that was it for a little bit…
Facebook was big into quizzes back then, and we both took a “Which Sailor Scout are you?” quiz.
I got Sailor Mercury, which is obvious if you know me and the Sailor Scouts.
She commented on it, and I commented on her results.
We flirted back and forth on Facebook enough that it finally seemed super obvious that I should just ask her out.
So I gathered my courage once again and did so.
We saw the movie “I Love You Man,” which is a great movie BTW, probably my favourite Rom-Com of all time.
We had a good first date… and then we dove in head first.
I was her first boyfriend, she was technically speaking my “rebound”.
Except that’s not how I do things.
In Neverwinter Nights, the video game of D&D 3rd edition made by Bioware, me and my friends played on a RP heavy server called Mystara.
I had a long term character on there who got to level 21, which is an epic level character.
He was highly respected in the community and one of the pillars of the town.
He was my very first D&D character… and he was basically just me.
So what happened on the server was what happened in real life, when you finish a long term character, generally you do something crazy with the next one… as they’re the “rebound” character.
When I retired my first character I started playing as a character that was more of what I wanted to be, and he’s probably my favourite character I’ve ever played.
He was charismatic and friendly, and he even got an in game girlfriend.
I loved playing him and would have continued to do so until I wasn’t able to.
He wasn’t a rebound character, he was who I wanted to play all along, the first character was just a warm up.
So she wasn’t a rebound, she was who I had always wanted to be with, the first GF was just a warm up.
I fixed a lot of the mistakes I’d made with GF number 1.
I made time to hang out with my friends outside of her, and gave her the same space.
Don’t get me wrong, all I wanted to do was spend time with her.
And we did spend a lot of time together.
We are two sides of the same coin.
She’s the female version of me, while I’m the male version of her.
We complete each other.
I honestly never thought, back when I first saw her on the first day of high school, that she would be my soul mate.
After a few years we moved in together to test if we could live with each other.
But we moved in with 3 other people to make it a little cheaper.
Then we moved out with just us and our cat.
And it worked.
I grew up a lot in this time.
We then finally had enough money saved up to go on a trip, we went to the south island of New Zealand.
And there I proposed.
I was sooooooo nervous, though I had no reason to be.
We got married a year and a half after.
But those are stories for another time… but one thing has been certain the whole time.
We’ve been madly in love the whole time.
I hope everyone who reads this gets the chance to find someone as special as my wife is to me.
Happy Anniversary to Mai Waifu!