My family consists of a loving husband and a beautiful 3 year old daughter. I have been married for 10 wonderful years. Smoka and I actually met online in 1996. We both used a chat program called PowWow. I was not working so it seemed the way to get through my divorce and not going insane was to vent about it. What a better place to vent than to people you didn’t know was my thinking. We were both going through divorces. The way PowWow was setup was you were in a main chatroom, but had the option to speak discreetly with 1-9 people. Smoka would come into the room and say hello, but I would never respond. At that point, I felt all men were the same so why waste my time even saying hello.

After a few weeks of seeing each other in the chatroom, out of the blue Smoka paged me (decided to try talking discreetly to me). I accepted the chat and had no idea what I was in for. The first thing he puts into the chat was “You know you want me”. At first I didn’t know what to say. From seeing him in the Chat Room area, I knew him as a joking type guy. If I wasn’t going through a hard time with divorce (the X had ran around etc), I know I would have talked to him. He had the attitude that anyone would want to be around. After several long chats, spending time together in the open chat room things turned into more of a 1 on 1 with him and me. We would chat for hours daily. He was also going through a very hard divorce. The difference was, he had 2 small children and I had no children. We had so many things in common it was amazing. We continued to chat for a few months, as well as talking on the phone. It seems we always had something to talk about, to get to know one another more each time. I know I was falling in love and had not even met this man.

He kept telling me he was going to get on a bus and come to visit me. Being across the United States was hard. One Sunday afternoon he did call me, to inform me he had a bus ticket in his hand and would be boarding a bus for my hometown in 30 minutes. I was totally shocked. My mom knew I had met someone online and that he wanted to come to meet in person one day. That was not my fear, the fear was informing my father of this all. My mom was a huge help in informing my father. His only thing he said to me was “What if he is a murderer?” I replied with, “What if the guy I meet at the supermarket or bar is?”

Well within 4 days Smoka was here to visit me. We hit it off from the very beginning. Meeting him was odd. I felt I knew him better than I knew anyone before in my life but at the same time I was scared. The nerves raced as I waited at the bus station to pick him up. The whole situation went so well. To this day, I still feel like I know him so much longer than I really do. After being here for a week, he informed me that if he could find a job here he would stay. I had just started a job the week before at a local ISP as a Technical Support Representative and they were hiring. Smoka put an application in, was interviewed and hired within a week’s time.

2 years to the day of the date he arrived here we were married. It was all so wonderful. After a bad marriage of nearly 5 years previously, I finally found the man of my dreams; my soul mate. I knew the day I married him that he was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. We have a very open relationship. We can tell one another anything. I feel everything in life is a learning experience that only makes us a stronger person.