How I met my honey ♡

I thought as today was Valentine's Day I'd share how I met my partner~ 

I met my partner through an online dating website. I originally joined an online dating website not to specifically find 'the one' but to talk to people about similar interests and possibly go on a few dates here and there.

The world of online dating is quite tedious at times. I had a variety of different messages that passed through my inbox. Around 75% of the messages I received were messages with very little effort; a lot of 'hey, how's you?', 'you're beautiful', 'do you want to meet up for sex?' etc. These messages just ended up getting deleted. 

I did receive a few messages where the sender had spent the time reading my profile but nothing really happened past the messaging stage. I think a part of me was also scared to meet up with people because you never know who they truly are behind the computer screen. As well as that I'd write long messages and get silly or short responses back.

Then I received a message from the man that would become my honey. My first impression was that he was very good looking and that he'd taken the time to write a proper message and had obviously read my profile. Our first ever conversation was about zombie films and would we class zombie films as a genre of their own and not as horror films. We went on to talk about videogames (especially Final Fantasy as we had that in common), music and our ecclectic hobbies. He was very easy to talk to and we messaged quite a lot and then swapped numbers. 

We didn't meet up for a while but the first time we met we went out for a drink and then went bowling. We also managed to get locked in the bowling alley because we sat talking in the bar area for ages. I remember being specifically scared to meet up with him because he's quite thing compared to me and I was scared of looking like an elephant next to him (I have a silly brain sometimes!). I found it was very very easy to talk to him, and the bowling was so much fun. We were both very competative. After this we went on two more dates for meals and to see a film and then after this we became a couple. 

We've been together for over three years now and I've been able to experience a lot of firsts with my honey; my first plane journey, moving out, our first daughter etc and we still have a lot to experience together as we get older. We've recently been talking about saving for a mortgage; scary grown up stuff! He was also there for me through my third knee surgery (where I got my first and only bunch of flowers from him haha).

I'm glad I keep all my pictures on DropBox~ Here's a few pictures from our firsts.  There's a rare appearance of my honey there teaching Aoife about videogames.

I'm not saying that everyday has been perfect. Like most couples we've had ups and downs too. We also don't really celebrate Valentine's Day or our Anniversary of when we got together. Mainly because we tell eachother we love eachother very often and we're always buying little gifts for eachother here and there as a surprise so we don't really need set days to do that for eachother.

When a lot of people ask how we met and I say online dating they're pretty shocked or amazed. Not everyone is as lucky at online dating. I spoke to some people who had no luck at all with online dating. I think it doesn't matter what online dating website you use, you'd most likely always get some creepy people sending you messages.

I'd say to anyone who is thinking about meeting people through online dating is to first take it slow and don't meet up with them too quickly. If they were really interested in you then they'd understand that you need to get to know them first. Also meeting in public places when you do decide to meet them, not just for the first date but for a few dates afterwards. I always told my mum where I was as well because, even though I was old enough to date and have a personal life, I knew it made her worry meeting someone off the internet.