So, get this, after many, many years of searching and bad dates, and bad boyfriends, I'm finally getting married. In almost, exactly a year. So the calenders have been marked for a Saturday in September of 2015 (the exact date is still TBD).
Ryan and I met in high school, although we can't really remember each other. Several years after graduation, I had been casually dating around, picking up one loser after another off of OKCupid when one day, I stumbled across his profile. We quipped back and forth a few times online and by text, waiting until the dust settled from the trainwrecks we were each seeing.
We met up on a Tuesday night at the bar 3 Monkeys in RVA. Why 3 Monkeys? Originally he suggested another bar closer to my work, Brass Monkey. I was vegetarian at that time (I quickly got over that) and was not impressed with the lack of meatless meals they offered. Sticking to the Monkey theme, I changed the venue to 3 Monkeys instead, even though it meant a longer commute for me.
The date almost got thwarted by traffic on I-95. To prove that I wasn't making it up in order to get out of a lame date, I sent him a photo text of the stopped cars and the wonderful view of fireworks coming from the Diamond (our local minor league baseball stadium) that night.
Eventually, I made it to the restaurant, sat down to a lovely dinner with someone that I could only describe to my friends as the "male version of myself". At one point, our eyes locked and I was overcome with this feeling that everything was completely right and that I had found the one for me.
