How you met your significant other

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I think if people who are in a relationship tell me how they met their significant others, it will give me a better idea of what steps to take to get into a relationship with someone at some point. I have never been in a relationship, and I have no idea where to start. I guess dating is always a start, but shouldn't you get to know the person a little before doing so? This whole thing is very confusing to me and I need someone to clear it up for me.

I've met SOs through work, school, musical performing groups and shared interests... have been on blind dates and internet connections. I met my wife while working at the same company, albeit on opposite sides of the country. We stayed in touch, stayed close, and things continued to develop over the years.


M.

Every one on my partners throughout my entire life had one thing in common: we knew each other for a while before we got involved romantically. School, work, friend circles, activities, neighbors, friendships between parents, you name it... I'd estimate that I knew each of the women for at least a month before we went on any kind of a date. I knew my second wife for 5 years before asking her out.

I have dated a lot of women, but not a single one of them was a result of either a cold pickup on the street or blind date or was met at a bar. And that was not because of lack of trying...

Also, although I never tried it, I am sure that online dating would be an utter waste of time for me. I can't imagine how that could end up in a relationship no matter how much imagination I use.

I met my husband in a taxi cab. I was the passenger and he was the driver.

If I hadn't been carrying one of my (and as it turns out, his) favorite books he might have been too shy to talk to me.

I met my boyfriend through a friend. We have been pretty much inseparable ever since.

Right here at the Wrong Planet.

I met my husband at another forum when I posted a thread asking if anyone in the area wants to hang out with me. He sent me a PM and we chatted on IM for three weeks and then we met. He kept seeing me on his days off and then we eventually became a couple and we moved in together.

I met my SO at an Aspie support group. He told me he was interested as soon as I walked into the room!

We were both attending Eastern Michigan Univ. Back in the day when the men's and women's dorms were separate. I was working the lunch/dinner line in the men's dorm. He came through, I said, "with or without gravy".

I thought of her one day. I just cannot let her get out of my mind.

I am a Beatles collector, who used to live in Canada. Back in 1996, I had a classified ad in a bootleg review newsletter to trade tapes of bootlegs by mail. I got a letter from a young woman in Mississippi who wished to get some tapes. Awhile later, she ordered some more, and we started being friendly in our correspondence. We discovered that we had all kinds of things in common - both collectors, liked the same kind of music, both musicians... Then I got a letter saying that she couldn't get any more tapes right away because she was moving back to Florida to go to grad school and get her Master's degree in music. But would I still write to her? Of course I would!

We wrote back and forth more often, and she looked up my number and called me on my birthday. That was the start of it. It progressed from friends on paper and sometimes on the phone to wanting to meet. I got on a plane for the first time to go to Florida to meet her in December 1996. It went so well that we began to fall in love. We started writing 35-page letters back and forth, getting to know each other on paper, and I eventually racked up so much money in arrears to the phone company that they took away my ability to use long distance! So she called me. She visited me in Canada twice in 1997, and when I went to see her again that December, I asked her to marry me. She said yes. I came back at the end of April 1998, and we were married on May 9th. Then we applied for my Green Card, and I started a new life from scratch. I have a career now, I'm a homeowner... all stuff that I don't think I would ever have managed to do on my own.

It's been the best thing that ever happened to me.

So you may find someone compatible with you by having an interest that they share, and being where they go (probably somewhere on the internet now). It's got to be a LOT easier than trying to date any number of people looking for someone like you, out of an impossible number of random strangers. I could never have done it that way. For me, it was a happy accident.

We met through mutual friends, at a party. They both knew that we were single and were looking for someone to have a relationship with...and it worked beautifully. Both on the spectrum. Left to my own choices, I only picked completely unsuitable people.

Completely randomly, during a walk in my neighborhood. I had never met anyone during any of my walks before, and in fact was in the middle of a really long dry streak, dating-wise. Just goes to show you you can meet the right person anywhere, so always be ready, and always make a social contact if you can.

I met my first wife sort of by way of computers. This was back in the Eighties, when the Internet was mostly for universities, and local Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) were how individuals met online. We were members of the same boards, and she was also a member of a group from the boards that would meet on Friday nights for bowling. (This was what passed for excitement in Omaha, NE, in those days.) I was at the bowling alley, playing a video game, and a little boy kept coming up and interrupting me. I finally took him back to his mother - an act which, while I don't regret it, did lead to some regrettable consequences.

Ten years later, when she had left me for another meal ticke- er, I mean, another man, I was in a regionally-based online chat room, moping loudly. One person there was willing to put up with it, because I'd helped her through a rough patch a few months earlier. We started to - ah - "have feelings" for each other, and agreed to meet face-to-face at a chatroom-sponsored picnic (following the major rule of online meets - make the first meeting in a public place, with lots of exits and lots of witnesses). That was going on thirteen years ago now...