We Meet – A Closer Look

As I mentioned last time, The Canadian Gal and I met while playing one of those Facebook games in which you buy and sell each other. I bought her and she started the email exchange with this:

Why ever would you buy a complete stranger’s photo without saying hi.???
:)

I replied thusly:

Hello Canadian Gal,

Mostly because I don't want to come off as Creepy-Internet Guy. (Or as an American who has trouble minding his own business -- you know how we are.)

Now, if someone buys me I send off a little blurb about what a bargain I am, what a good choice they've made, and brag on my abilities to dig things out from beneath the fridge.

How is everything in British Columbia today? It's cold here with some ice and snow -- though I hesitate to complain as I imagine you get hit by it a little harder than we do.

There is a lot of truth in the bit about not wanting to come off as Creepy Internet Guy. I was pretty sure women got hit on all the time (you don’t have to look to far in the blogospshere to find stories of guys saying off-the-wall things to women in on-line forums) and I didn’t want to be put into that lot. Also, I’m a bit shy. And I was still hurting from my divorce, if I’m to be totally honest.

(But, then again, if I were to have been totally honest, in that email I’d have included a blurb about how I won’t dig things out from under a fridge if I suspect there might be a spider beneath it.)

We continued this way for a bit, I recall in one mail she reminded me that I’d never given her an answer as to why I was buying photos of strange women. I sent this reply into the ether:

Why did I buy you? Well, as much as I'd like to say it's because Canadians hold their value well and are a good investment, it was a bit more shallow than that. I was buying attractive women; brunettes are one of my three favorite groups.

She has been kind enough to never let me forget that last sentence.

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We Meet

I “met” the Canadian Gal on Facebook when we were both playing the same game – one of those where you buy and sell people --  and I bought her photo. She emailed me, playfully suggesting it was rather rude of me to buy her and not say “hello,” and our friendship was born. (What I didn’t realize at the time was that a guy the Canadian Gal had briefly dated had entered her into the game we were playing.)

She was really cute. She was also very far away. I mean, Canada isn’t all that far from Ohio – we both bump into Lake Erie, and a person just has to take a short romp through Michigan to hit the American/Canadian border – but parts of it are sort of distant. Vancouver for example. Which is where she lives -- twenty-five hundred miles from Central Ohio.

 

I’ll admit right now I had to do some Googling to find out where Vancouver was but when I found it it seemed to be pretty far off.  As you can see from the map if you were to drive from Central Ohio to her part of Canada you’d pass through many of the states that are hardly ever used before finally making it to the Peace Arch.

It looked like ours was destined to be a long-distance, Windows-Instant-Messenger type friendship.

Technorati Tags: Dating after Divorce,Dating,International Dating,Americans Marrying Canadians

I’m getting Married

To a Canadian.

Which is not a big deal if you, yourself, are Canadian, but it is a little more work if you’re an American. Especially if the two of you lived 2500 miles apart when you "met.”

But I’m getting a little bit ahead of where I want to be right now.

I’m a divorced father of three boys. She’s a divorced mother of three girls.

The whole thing would be very Brady Bunch except for two things… the girls are all brunettes, so we’re sort of foiled with respect to the “They all had hair of gold,” lyric. And she also has two boys, so we’ve got more of an Eight is Enough thing working.

Eight children.

It sounds like a lot. However, if you consider that $1.20 Canadian is equal to $1.00 American these days, it’s not hard to imagine five children Canadian are the equivalent of four children American.

Not that it matters. Seven. Eight. We’ll still need to take two cars when we go places.

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