How To Save A Life

As these two writers recognize, there are good and bad people both on and off line. It takes courage to pursue a relationship when your trust has been used up. Sometimes, though, the hero does come "riding in" across the internet lines just in time to save a life.

Before I met Steve, I had been in and out of two long term relationships.  It took a lot of guts, but I had broken up with my previous boyfriend of five years to explore my feelings. After I had broken up with my ex, I was participating in some weird on-line relationships.  Needless to say, that didn't work out...it was just an experience, that was all.  For the most part, I found that (as in any community) the on-line community was filled with people who are good people and people who are not so good.
I had made a lot of online friends over the years and one of them was Steve.  Out of all of the people that I talked to, Steve was the only person that I had a genuine respect for.  Aside from the fact that we shared the same interests, I saw that he had a lot more to offer as a person.  He is the most intelligent person that I had ever met in my life.  He is also very sweet, charming, and funny, and shares the same sarcastic sense of humor that I do.  It's like I had finally found somebody who just 'got me'.

After two weeks of talking, Steve and I met up in person.  Looking back, I guess you could call this our first date.  He wasn't like any other guy that I had ever met in my whole life.  He was very shy when it came to making the first move, and I am not one to make the first move.He is one of the few guys who I've been on a date with who respected me too much to even try anything.  I took the train up to Connecticut from New York and he took me on a picnic.  After that, he drove me around to different places in Connecticut, since I had never really been there before.  We talked and talked the whole day.  When the sun started to go down, we went out to eat at a cute little restaurant in New Haven and then he drove me home (all the way back to Queens, NY).  I could tell that when he dropped me off he wanted to kiss me, but he was just too shy.

After our first meeting, he kept asking me out on more dates, but I just kept rejecting him.  I guess the main reason why I kept on rejecting him was because I had just gotten out of two long term relationships in a row and I wasn't sure that I was ready for another one.  We did, however, keep on talking as friends just about every night.  Eventually it came to the point where every day I looked forward to coming home and telling him about my day, which lead me to start feeling that I really did want him in my life as more than just a friend.  It was about a year after our first meeting that we started a serious relationship together.  Steve was so  different than anybody else that I had ever been with.  He opened my eyes to new experiences, and I came to realize that we had so much in common.
A year after we had been together, I moved in with Steve.  After a year of living with him, he proposed to me in the restaurant that we went to on our first date and I said ‘yes’.  We were married on April 2nd, 2011 in Connecticut and we honeymooned in Grand Cayman.  We are happy to have found each other and are looking forward to spending the rest of our lives together.