How We Met Pt. 3
Laurel I don't remember much about waiting for the second message, except that I was excited and I was hoping he'd keep writing to me. When it came, I was even more excited. I felt like I knew him. It felt so much like I was talking to my best friend, or a male version of myself. And I was scared.
I knew, even after only two messages, that there was more potential for a relationship there than I had expected to find. At all. Ever. I knew that I got shaky and a little cold when I thought about it, but I wrote that off as excitement. And I was excited. But I now recognize just how much of it was fear. At first, fear that he'd stop talking to me, and this chance would slip away. There was far more to it than that, but at that moment, that was the only one I had a label for. It would take me a long time to put names and explanations with the others.
My excitement grew as I wrote back, a longer message than before. I had a feeling, even then, that that would be the template for our communications. And our messages grew longer and longer. It started taking several days for me to respond, there was so much to respond to, so much to say. Our conversations quickly went into deeper subjects, subjects where we had differences.
It was around that time I discovered that I was afraid. I could see where our relationship could go, and it frightened me.
My ex-boyfriend and I had had many major differences. Any differences frightened me at that point, especially in someone I was considering as a possible future mate. Even if I wouldn't admit to myself that's what I was doing. So we debated, argued, there was even a section in our messages that was dubbed "the debate section." I would get worked up and angry while writing my half of that section. The subject didn't matter - I wasn't defending it because the subject mattered to me, although it did - I was defending it because I really liked him, a part of me wanted it to be more than a friendship because of how we clicked together, and the idea of differences between us terrified me. I wanted the differences to vanish so I could relax and not be afraid.
We only exchanged nine messages over the site where we met. I tried to send a message one day, and the site wouldn't let me send it. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want him to think that I was ignoring him, but my message wouldn't send. So my best friend suggested that I find him on Facebook.
One of my cardinal rules of online dating was to not friend random people on Facebook. I'd had creepy people I had just met ask me to friend them, and I didn't want some stranger knowing so much about me. I'd also made myself a rule when I joined Facebook - never friend someone I hadn't met in real life.
But I didn't have much choice. And besides - it was just a message. So I looked him up. I knew what his first name was; he'd told me that and the titles of his books, so I looked up his books to get his last name, and matched his dating site profile picture with pictures on his Facebook page. and then I sent a message, telling him what was going on. Not long after, we became friends on Facebook.
Seth Long messages are not a common thing in the online dating world, in my experience. Most people, whether by habit, or lack of knowledge, or simply being too shy, respond in the manner similar to texting, with short responses and curt replies that leave much to the imagination and little to the task of actually learning about someone you’ve just met. That is why I took not just a short time in my responses to Laurel, but went beyond that and perhaps entered the realm of ‘Gee, this guy sure does talk a lot’; because I knew that, were I on the other end of the computer screen reading a message, I would want those long, detailed responses.
So it was that, not even a month after we met, our messages had bloomed well beyond the average chapter length of a novel, and often took hours, sometimes days, to respond to. That is why I wasn’t worried when I didn’t hear anything from Laurel for a couple days. After all, it took me at least two before I could finish a full response, and I made it daily habit to write; I had no idea if she did the same, and I certainly wouldn’t expect anything quicker.
What I was surprised to find, coming home one evening after a long day of work, was a message waiting for me on Facebook. Now, I had learned Laurel’s true name before that message was sent, so it’s not as if I wondered who it was that had messaged me; but I had also gathered from our messaging back and forth that Laurel was an extremely private and quiet person, and that something so bold as sending an unsolicited message on Facebook was not quite in her character. I did a double-take when I saw it, then perhaps a triple-take, if there is such a thing. Immediately I wondered if she had fallen to some sort of hack, so out of place it seemed. But when I read her message, still written with the same thought and elegance that her others had been, I knew it was genuinely her. I immediately accepted her friend request and got to work on my own reply, promising that I would send it through Email from then on.
Now, here was where the tricky parts of our back and forth began to arise. We had, as it were, reached a sort of ‘known’ stage in our talks. That is, I knew a lot of ‘stuff’ about her, and she knew a lot about me, but we didn’t really ‘know’ each other. I took this engagement on Facebook as a chance to change that. We could use the IM system to message each other in real time and fill in that lack of personal flair that pre-written messages brought.
I was both parts nervous and excited. That first conversation can be a very stressful thing. Would she still be detailed in a regular conversation? Was she nice and patient? Or was she completely different when the situation become more personal? I would be lying if I said Laurel ended up being exactly the same as I had envisioned her through our long messages, but that is not for the worse; she was much more engaging and friendly than I had hoped, and she made up for lack of detail (which no one could sustain in one to one conversation) with intelligent response and questions. I was excited! She was more than I had hoped for, and she seemed genuinely interested in keeping our conversation going. I immediately ceased most of the ongoing messaging I had on the dating site with other girls. Few of those conversations were promising anyways, but even had they been, Laurel was proving herself more interesting than any I had met in my online journey and I knew she deserved the most of my time.
So it was that we moved over to Facebook and our talks became more interesting. We had our differences, but through all our messages they had seemed minor. That, however, was soon to change.
I knew, even after only two messages, that there was more potential for a relationship there than I had expected to find. At all. Ever. I knew that I got shaky and a little cold when I thought about it, but I wrote that off as excitement. And I was excited. But I now recognize just how much of it was fear. At first, fear that he'd stop talking to me, and this chance would slip away. There was far more to it than that, but at that moment, that was the only one I had a label for. It would take me a long time to put names and explanations with the others.
My excitement grew as I wrote back, a longer message than before. I had a feeling, even then, that that would be the template for our communications. And our messages grew longer and longer. It started taking several days for me to respond, there was so much to respond to, so much to say. Our conversations quickly went into deeper subjects, subjects where we had differences.
It was around that time I discovered that I was afraid. I could see where our relationship could go, and it frightened me.
My ex-boyfriend and I had had many major differences. Any differences frightened me at that point, especially in someone I was considering as a possible future mate. Even if I wouldn't admit to myself that's what I was doing. So we debated, argued, there was even a section in our messages that was dubbed "the debate section." I would get worked up and angry while writing my half of that section. The subject didn't matter - I wasn't defending it because the subject mattered to me, although it did - I was defending it because I really liked him, a part of me wanted it to be more than a friendship because of how we clicked together, and the idea of differences between us terrified me. I wanted the differences to vanish so I could relax and not be afraid.
We only exchanged nine messages over the site where we met. I tried to send a message one day, and the site wouldn't let me send it. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want him to think that I was ignoring him, but my message wouldn't send. So my best friend suggested that I find him on Facebook.
One of my cardinal rules of online dating was to not friend random people on Facebook. I'd had creepy people I had just met ask me to friend them, and I didn't want some stranger knowing so much about me. I'd also made myself a rule when I joined Facebook - never friend someone I hadn't met in real life.
But I didn't have much choice. And besides - it was just a message. So I looked him up. I knew what his first name was; he'd told me that and the titles of his books, so I looked up his books to get his last name, and matched his dating site profile picture with pictures on his Facebook page. and then I sent a message, telling him what was going on. Not long after, we became friends on Facebook.
Seth Long messages are not a common thing in the online dating world, in my experience. Most people, whether by habit, or lack of knowledge, or simply being too shy, respond in the manner similar to texting, with short responses and curt replies that leave much to the imagination and little to the task of actually learning about someone you’ve just met. That is why I took not just a short time in my responses to Laurel, but went beyond that and perhaps entered the realm of ‘Gee, this guy sure does talk a lot’; because I knew that, were I on the other end of the computer screen reading a message, I would want those long, detailed responses.
So it was that, not even a month after we met, our messages had bloomed well beyond the average chapter length of a novel, and often took hours, sometimes days, to respond to. That is why I wasn’t worried when I didn’t hear anything from Laurel for a couple days. After all, it took me at least two before I could finish a full response, and I made it daily habit to write; I had no idea if she did the same, and I certainly wouldn’t expect anything quicker.
What I was surprised to find, coming home one evening after a long day of work, was a message waiting for me on Facebook. Now, I had learned Laurel’s true name before that message was sent, so it’s not as if I wondered who it was that had messaged me; but I had also gathered from our messaging back and forth that Laurel was an extremely private and quiet person, and that something so bold as sending an unsolicited message on Facebook was not quite in her character. I did a double-take when I saw it, then perhaps a triple-take, if there is such a thing. Immediately I wondered if she had fallen to some sort of hack, so out of place it seemed. But when I read her message, still written with the same thought and elegance that her others had been, I knew it was genuinely her. I immediately accepted her friend request and got to work on my own reply, promising that I would send it through Email from then on.
Now, here was where the tricky parts of our back and forth began to arise. We had, as it were, reached a sort of ‘known’ stage in our talks. That is, I knew a lot of ‘stuff’ about her, and she knew a lot about me, but we didn’t really ‘know’ each other. I took this engagement on Facebook as a chance to change that. We could use the IM system to message each other in real time and fill in that lack of personal flair that pre-written messages brought.
I was both parts nervous and excited. That first conversation can be a very stressful thing. Would she still be detailed in a regular conversation? Was she nice and patient? Or was she completely different when the situation become more personal? I would be lying if I said Laurel ended up being exactly the same as I had envisioned her through our long messages, but that is not for the worse; she was much more engaging and friendly than I had hoped, and she made up for lack of detail (which no one could sustain in one to one conversation) with intelligent response and questions. I was excited! She was more than I had hoped for, and she seemed genuinely interested in keeping our conversation going. I immediately ceased most of the ongoing messaging I had on the dating site with other girls. Few of those conversations were promising anyways, but even had they been, Laurel was proving herself more interesting than any I had met in my online journey and I knew she deserved the most of my time.
So it was that we moved over to Facebook and our talks became more interesting. We had our differences, but through all our messages they had seemed minor. That, however, was soon to change.
No comments have been added yet.
