How we talked and talked and talked...part 1 1/2

So I've been convinced to add another chapter to the saga of how two internet nerds met and found love. We talked, and talked and talked and then talked some more. Shawns birthday last year was pretty traumatizing for everyone. I was in and out of a relationship that was suffering greatly because of my relationship with the kids, their mom and my close friends who'd been my all for so many years. I guess to give some history, I was a late bloomer.

I had zero girlfriends growing up and my first dates and kiss in college at the ripe young age of 22. Maybe TMI, I lost my virginity at the ripe young age of 26 and it wasn'tn something to write home to mom about. I was a very outgoing and energetic person with my friends of which many were girls but I had absolute zero confidence when it came to talking to women that I might have wanted to pursue. My lack of confidence and absolute debilitating fear of rejection meant that unless a woman knocked me over the head and said you're gonna be my boyfriend or we're gonna have sex, it just wasn't happening. Then a strange, yet oddly wonderful thing happened. My best friends 17 year old niece came with his mom to visit us one weekend. Now I'd known her since she was 6 so no gutter-minds please lol. Being a complete geek in high-school and college I knew all about the internet and chat as we'd chatted to people around the world using the old frame-relay chat programs at college. Back when we were chatting in college everything was done on mainframes so it wasn't like we'd go back to our rooms and continue chatting with people online. With that in mind, I never really ventured to see what programs there were for PC's to let people chat with one another after we graduated. This is where the visit comes in. We took her around Atlanta and showed her the sights but all she really wanted to do was play on the computer in these yahoo chat rooms. I'd just recently started talking to people on Yahoo and ICQ which was the biggie back then but I had no idea you could meet and talk to people you didn't know already from somewhere.

Well, up to that point, pretty much the only people I talked to online where my friends from school that were using this program or that but I decided to check out these so-called chat rooms and see who hung aroud there. I met my very first online total stranger friend whom I still talk to today though only two or three times a year. She lives in the UK now but back then she lived in Australia and I'm not even sure how we first started talking but we became quick friends and even phoned from time to time, a very expensive option back then at $1 a minute. The thing was, she was beautiful, I mean beautiful as we'd also traded pictures and for the first time in my life, a beautiful woman thought I was also attractive. I wasn't quite sure how to take it because I'd been all but ignored by girls my whole life and I had other issues that prevented me from even considering trying to talk to them.

This was new though and I started to find it easier to talk to women I found attractive online because even if there was going to be rejection, it wasn't faced to face and I didn't feel like I would have people laughing at me cause no one would know right? Now there was a problem with my new found confidence, wanna guess what it was? Yup, the internet is worldwide and wouldn't you know unlike MM, nearly everytime I met someone that I clicked with or that was attracted to me, they were half the country or half the world away. Well that didn't deter me too much because even though I wasn't likely to ever meet any of them, it was nice to know that women somewhere were attracted to me which meant that maybe one day I'd actually meet someone local or near-local IRL that would be too. It helped a lot with my confidence too which of course shows when you're talking to someone.

TMI part I: well obviously if I wasn't able to talk to women IRL, I wasn't dating or having sex but you know there are other ways to take care of oneself. I guess I'm a little embarrassed mentioning it here but I wasn't embarrassed when I was having my fun and you cant have much safer sex than masturbation...lol. Well that was the beginning and over time some of the groups that I was involved with online spilled over into real-time and to put it mildly, I made up for some of those lost years. Still, unless I'd talked to someone for a long time online and knew exactly where we both were ahead of time I wasn't the type to initiate anything from kissing to well you know. So it could be said that most of my early sexual experiences, I wasn't the agressor. However, online I was more Clark Gable or Dirk Diggler than Steve Urkel or PeeWee Herman so I definitely wouldn't have had as many dates were it not for the wonder of the internet.

Wow, that was a lot of background wasn't it? To bring us back up to date with the cstl/syren story, before the first phone call there was lots of flirting cause I'm a huge online flirt. IRL, not so much unless we've known each other pretty well online. After the first phone call came lots and lots and lots of calls. I just felt completely at ease with Tara from the beginning and began to tell her stuff that I wouldn't/couldn't tell anyone else in the world. That was nearly the title of some of my early emails to her. I most definitely wont post those here but the title was "Things I can only tell Tara" and I knew we would be friends forever after a few emails. Well of course the emails led to chatting and thanks to Jennies antics on Shawn's birthday led to us talking on the phone. And did we ever talk. Funny thing was, we were just good friends and becoming better friends during all that time. She actually was trying to help me with decisions about other relationships that I was in at the time and I tried to help her with the issues with her son and ex.

TMI part II: Well, I wasn't exactly a doe-eyed innocent anymore as I'd learned that people were more willing to get to know someone online attraction or not than they were IRL, but a lot of times once they got to know you, if there was an attraction, there were no head games. It wasn't necessarily like most people think but I wasn't warming the bench anymore.

After a major breakup, I was just ready to have some fun and not try to worry about relationships and she knew it becuase I told her everything. I was also a bit of a showoff (in the non-traditional sense) and she knew that but that wasn't her thing so we didn't really push that issue. We did however have some pretty interesting conversations on the phone and we found out that when it came to sex, love and relationships, we thought alot alike. One day while on a business trip, we were talking and I mentioned something about being turned on and nekkid. Well, next thing you know, we were each in different states but we were coming together as one so to speak..lol. Well, at least until my phone died and I couldn't call back till the next morning when it finished charging. Looking back, there were other indications that our first meeting might be unlike most peep meets but that phone call pretty much sealed the deal.

Sorry for the extensive background but without it you might not understand how this would have never happened without RTVW and the internet.