Kellie and I met in late 2011 on the internet, in fandom spaces. At the time, it was specifically for the Dragon Age games. Kellie was fairly well-known as a fan artist, I was fairly well-known as a fan writer, and we had a lot of mutual friends so we ended up in a lot of the same group chats, reblog chains and live streams. We ended up online together, we started Skyping for hours at a time (our record was a 16-hour continuous voice call). We talked about our Dragon Age player characters a lot, and I like to joke that it was about this time that I started not being able to tell if our characters had a crush on each other or if we did. Turns out it was both.

Notable: on April 19, 2012, I went out to a Chinese restaurant with a friend of mine, and my fortune cookie was oddly specific. It said, “Something good will happen three months from now.” Well, I couldn’t pass that up, so I wrote the date on the back of the fortune so I’d remember. (I kept the fortune but I’m not sure where it ended up when we moved.) In exactly three months, on July 19, 2012, a week after my birthday, Kellie and I were having a conversation on Skype and both admitted we had crushes, and talked about dating. We both hated long-distance relationships (she lived in VA, I lived in SC), and we both admitted that we had a short attention span for relationships and tended to be in and out of them very quickly. “So don’t take it personally if I kind of flake on you after a few weeks,” I said, and she said, “Oh no, I’ll probably flake first, don’t worry about it.”

This summer will be seven years that we’ve been dating, so I guess the formula for success was “find someone with an equally short attention span so you’ll never get bored,” lol.

I moved to Virginia in April of 2013, and in February 2015 we took our first trip to Disney World, which started a long and expensive process. I had been a couple of times over the years, but Kellie had never been before, and we both loved the whole experience. In February 2016, we had planned a repeat trip and it was on that trip that we decided that we wanted to move to Florida. It took us two years to make it happen, but on April 9, 2018, we packed our car and drove twelve hours down I-95 to our new home.

We’d also been talking about getting married since 2015 (in true-to-us fashion, we chickened out several times). So my best friend told me last year, “Hey, I’m trying to make travel plans. Are you actually getting married any time soon or not? Because if you are I’ll wait to come to Florida until the wedding.” And I yelled across the house to Kellie, “Hey, are we getting married anytime soon?” like the smart ass that I am, but she yelled back, “I mean, I guess we can!” So now we’re getting married. And that’s us.”

Jules

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