A portion of this Factoid is going to be spent with me gushing about my girlfriend. I just thought I would put that out there as a warning. There will be cheese, oh yes, there will be cheese. But, meeting the woman of your dreams is a powerful experience.
They talk about things like ‘compatibility’ and ‘chemistry’. They say ‘when you meet the right person, you just know’ or ‘it just feels right’. You never really understand ‘chemistry’ until you find someone with whom you have fantastic chemistry. This woman I found, I get along with better than friends I have known for almost my entire life. I have known these people for years, and her for months, and I get along better with her than I do them. For the life of me, I cannot explain what chemistry is, but when you find it, you know.
I never really knew what ‘compatibility’ was either, until I met this woman. Compatibility is a lot more than similarity in interests and likes and dislikes. Compatibility isn’t only about the ways in which you are the same or similar: it is also about the ways in which you are different. It’s like a puzzle piece: there are places where you are even, but there are also places where you lack something and they fill it in. Compatibility is a matter of personalities matching.
So how did I get here? How did I find the woman of my dreams?
A personal ad online.
Here’s the entire story:
I had been trying to find a woman for over a year and hardly had a date to show for it. Dozens of websites promising to match me with someone let me down. I met with failure at every turn. I finally resorted to Craigslist. If trying to meet someone online is a gamble, Craigslist is Russian Roulette. The odds of success are low, and the risks are higher due to utter lack of a screening process. I posted several ads and got some mediocre to decent responses. Had some interesting exchanges with interesting women.
I consider these ads as practice. I was honing in on (a) what makes me special and unique and (b) what kind of person I was looking for. I started by casting a broad net and gradually adding restrictions on things I found repulsive (smoking is a major turn-off, for example) and adding preferences (intelligence and education). Eventually, I felt that I had a pretty good idea what my perfect woman would look like, and, in what basically amounted to an act of desperation, I posted an ad looking for her. Every detail I wanted, I mentioned. I thought that there was no possible way anyone would respond to that ad. I dubbed it a valiant effort, but started considering what tactic I would try for my next ad.
And then She responded.
I won’t say how I knew, but from the first email, I knew this was a special woman.
But it wasn’t so straightforward as that. She was living out of my hometown for several months, and so we would be unable to meet for some time. This turned out to be the best thing ever. We emailed. We emailed incessantly, almost every night. We discussed an amazing variety of topics and found that we had a ton in common. We just focused on the other person, their personality, not what they do to/with us or how they look. People talk about how they were friends first, She and I were penpals first.
With intellectual and emotional connections, would the physical attraction be there too? We finally met in person, and oh yes, the attraction is there.
So with all those horror stories, tales of perverts and liars, murderers and mutants, it is possible to find love online.
