In brief, Stuart and I met online. I had posted a note in January to alt.gothic regarding some photos that I'd finally scanned and put on my web page. He went off to have a look, and stayed long enough to look around the rest of the page. He became intrigued by the personality represented on the page and decided to find out more through correspondence.

Now, due to the facts that Cossack had named me "Goth Babe of the Week" about a year before, and that I had a singles ad up on my webpage, I got a lot of mail from random guys. Most of it I tended to ignore out of sheer laziness in my correspondence (as anyone who's had the patience to try to keep up a correspondence with me can attest). But he took a different tack by sending me a virtual rose from a link off my own site. His card, unfortunately (or was it?), got cut off in mid-sentence, and I was curious to see what the rest had said. So I responded to him. He finished the card and "novelized" me a bit. I found him interesting and kept up the correspondence.

He had recently come out of a long relationship and was just learning how to be single again, I had had a stretch of not much luck with men. So I gave him advice and he flattered me with his attentions. At first, all was perfectly innocent. But as the correspondence continued, he grew on me. I found myself feeling twinges of jealousy when he went on about other women around him. And apparently I was growing on him too.

Around mid-February, we decided to try talking on the phone. The first 5-hour call was a smashing success, and we followed that up with a 12-hour call the next week or so (the dates grow fuzzy in the memory, though the phone bills remember well). With that, a visit was certainly in order. He booked a flight for two weeks later, to spend three and a half days with me. We talked of things in the future, though we had yet to determine if there was any chemistry there in real life or not.

I couldn't eat for the better part of a week before he came. His threats of bringing along a diamond ring didn't help the nervous butterflies one bit. March 7, 1997, he flew in around 10:30 PM. A lady waiting at the airport for the same flight got me chatting since I was so obviously nervous, and took great delight in the story to that point.

Stuart got off the plane, approached me with a smile, and kissed me before a word was spoken. He asked me to marry him. I deferred the question until we'd gotten a chance to know one another a little better. I took him home with me, and when we arrived he pulled out a ring box. My heart almost stopped. He opened it to reveal a beautifully intricate gold filigreed ring, and he asked me to accept it as a promise ring (if not an engagement ring) - a promise to engage if things continued to go well.

We spent the weekend together and had a wonderful time. Periodically, he would ask again if I would marry him. I pondered the question long and hard each time, and each time was unable to answer him with a yes or a no. I wanted to know more; I wanted to be a little more sure.

Finally, Monday morning, before I took him to the airport, I realized that I was no longer demurring because of an uncertainty of my feelings toward him or of the relationship's potential, but simply out of fear of this crazy situation - meeting the man of my dreams on the net, falling in love, and deciding to get married, all in the course of two months. It wasn't logical, and my engineer's brain didn't know quite what to do with itself. But some things just can't be left to logic.

He asked once again "Amy, will you marry me?" And I hesitated.

And I said "Yes." He looked me in the eyes in half-disbelief. "Really?" And with a firm conviction, I answered "yes." And we were both so suddenly happy, so suddenly sure of everything.

Everything since then was been as any other engagement - a few ups and downs, difficulties in debating relocation (he lived in the San Francisco Bay area, I lived in Houston), and periods of failing patience. But the more time we spent together, the happier we were and the more time we wanted to spend together.

During the late summer, I turned down a position with his company. I had said from the beginning that I wanted to stay a couple of years to see my dream through, and he agreed to move and accepted a job with my company. His reluctance to move ate at me, though, and after his company gave him a substantial raise in an attempt to keep him there, I felt compelled to consider more seriously the notion of moving up there. After a harrowing internal debate, two job interviews with his company, and even apartment hunting up there, I decided that I really can't give up the dream so easily. If I find at some point that I can't handle the stress at this job any longer, we can move back up to the Bay - he feels confident that his company would hire him back, and I can surely find something to do as well. Otherwise, we plan on staying until my assigned International Space Station assembly flight (5A) flies (10/99), and then moving to the Bay so that he might continue his career in the biomedical device industry.