7 years of marriage

I've spent pretty much my entire adult life as a wife to my best friend. We got married when I was 19 and now as a 26 year old I can look back with a clear view at how blessed I am to have been given the life I have.

This seems like a nice day to recall a condensed version of how we met and got married....

Tim proposed to be in Dulles airport in Virginia. This was the first time I had ever been to Virginia and I was arriving from Oregon to visit him and his family. He brought music and a welcoming team. But this isn't really where the story begins. 

We met on the internet. 

 Before meeting on the internet was socially acceptable. 

Back then in the old days, when I told someone how we met they would give me a hurried and awkward acceptance of the idea and then stumble over some story about how somebody they knew met so and so on the internet and they are "really happy!".

We technically met by accident, but I don't really think it was an accident.  It was actually a U2 fansite called Interference.com in a public chat forum that we met. I was 18 and he was 30. We lived across the country from one another. I had a boyfriend. There was no reason to imagine that we would be getting married just months after we knew of one another. At that point I was pretty much convinced that I was going to marry Bono anyway. But for some inexplicable reason I decided to give him my phone number. He was too freaked out to do anything with it because he knew my age and wasn't interested in a relationship with a young girl, but he agreed to call me eventually. 

Our first phone conversation was 4 hours long. And the one after that. And so on. We talked about everything. The future. Our beliefs. What we wanted in life. Love. After about 3 months we had talked so much that the only next step was to meet in person, which we did 7 days after my 19th birthday on Jan 7 in my home state of Oregon. While spending the day together, we sat in some display couches in Costco to talk about life and both knew then that we wanted to get married. By the time he flew back home he had already had a talk with my dad about marrying me.

So, when I arrived the next month to visit Tim in Virginia, he proposed as soon as I got there. He brought his family and friends and had music playing and a ring from Tiffany & co. He was wearing a vintage U2 shirt with a suit jacket over it. He looked really hot. Lol.... 

Oh and as a side note, when we were engaged he took me to my first U2 concert. It was the first one I had ever been old enough to go to. We saw them in Denver and got creamed by a massive hail storm while waiting for hours in the line for general admission. But it was worth it. We got the last spot on a railing around the catwalk and got to see the band incredibly close. 

Also, Bono plucked me out of the audience and took me for a dance. Can we say "most mind blowing year ever"?

Then in July, 6 months after first seeing one another in person, we got married.  

 

I walked down the aisle to "where the streets have no name". 

 

 

 And we lived happily ever after.

 

F

looking back, I can see how everything could have gone horribly wrong. But I can also see that it was all meant to be. We were made for each other.