How it all began.

Mine's a bit of an unconventional story, so first let's journey back to October 1999.

Back then, I was 23 years old, still living at home (yeah, I know, I was lazy) didn't have much worry in my life other than working, giving my mum and dad some money every week to keep me and seeing my on-off girlfriend. I've always been very much into computer games and stuff so as an early Xmas present to myself, I bought the latest games console out at the time, a Sega Dreamcast.

I also soon discovered that you could browse the internet on them, something I'd never really done before. So I got my own phone line installed and away I went. I was soon using the Dreamcast online chatroom a lot more than playing games and talking to all kinds of weird and wonderful new people. I actually made some good real friends too, who I keep in touch with to this day.

Anyway, it got to New Year 2000 and my on-off girlfriend decided that she'd rather be permantly 'off' with me and 'on with some other guy instead...I was a bit upset but things had never been that serious with her anyway so I wasn't too bothered. But it did cause me to start deliberately talking to girls more on the Dreamcast chatroom.

A couple of months later at the beginning of March, I was looking at some message boards on the Dreamcast website and I saw a new message from a girl in Kent, it looked like she'd just started using the internet as well and she'd posted an alarming amount of personal detail about her life. I was a bit concerned to be honest, as I knew there were some right weirdos about so I emailed her. And things just kicked off from there. First she'd ask me for advice with a couple of games she'd bought, then we met up in the main chatroom, then we started talking about our personal lives a bit more in emails, then we started writing to each other and swapped photos.....yeah, you can see where this is going. Anyways, I found out that her mum and dad had just split up, her dad was getting remarried, she'd come out of an mentally abusive 2 year relationship just before New Year and was now taking anti-depressants. The more I got to know her, the more...I dunno...'protective' of her I started feeling and I just wanted her to be happy. Soon we swapped phone numbers and I took a deep breath and phoned her......that first phone call lasted for 4 hours and we didn't chat about anything in particular, we just kept making each other laugh. When I was off the phone to her I realised that I hadn't felt that good about myself in ages. After that, we started phoning each other for a bit pretty much every night after we'd been chatting online for a while and a couple of weeks later...I can't even remember what led up to it exactly...I ended up blurting out 'I love you' to her. Things went immediately silent and I thought 'crap, now you've blown it' but then I heard her....crying? and she told me she loved me too. That was probably the happiest moment of my life.

And at this point, we hadn't even met up! Well, that soon changed in May...she let me know that she was up in Manchester visiting her brother and would I like to meet her? Well, I jumped at the chance. We booked a room at a B&B for 2 nights (the night before she was meeting her brother and the night after), I booked my train ticket to Manchester, she met me at Victoria station and it was magical. We immediately got on, she was just as gorgeous as she looked in her photo, she seemed impressed with me and we booked into our room. I'd anticipated that we were just going to get to know each other a bit better and do a lot of talking because I really did like her, but things moved way faster than that and let's just say it was lucky that we had protection with us (lol).

We spent most of the next day at the Trafford Centre, not really doing much asides from grabbing and kissing each other a lot, then saw her brother later on. I got on well with him too, he's always said that he never thought I was his sister's 'usual type' but judging by a couple of the blokes she's been with, maybe that was good thing.

The next morning (after another passionate night) instead of putting me back on the train to Liverpool, she actually drove me all the way home, at which point we had a very emotional 'goodbye' and promised to see each other soon.

I invested in a Railcard straight away after that and was pretty soon travelling down to Kent once or twice a month (whenever I could get Fridays off work) and staying for the weekend. I really was in love and she seemed to be the only person who had ever truly loved me.

Looking back now, it was a situation just waiting to go pear shaped I suppose. But that's a story for the next blog entry....