Love works in mysterious ways. One never quite finds it in places that are expected. Sometimes the one you love is the person you grew up knowing from next door. Sometimes you spend 20+ years thinking that you love a person and find out that you had been lying to yourself. And sometimes love happens when it's the last thing on your mind.

My "how we met" story fits into the third category. In 1997, I re-acquainted myself with professional wrestling and found that I enjoyed it. By a chance circumstance, Pedro Boyd found a profile I had put up on Yahoo and asked me to join his fantasy wrestling federation, the FCWF. Since I enjoy writing, I joined and ended up helping Pedro with the workload. During my tenure there, I went through a very messy breakup with the guy I had been dating at the time. Indirectly, Pedro had shown me that there are guys out there that would treat me with the respect and dignity I deserved, something that the current boyfriend was not giving me.

Almost a month after the break-up, Pedro told me that he didn't have the time or energy to devote to the fed and planned to hand over the leadership duties to me. Since my college workload was starting to pick up, I realized that I didn't have much time to devote to FCWF either. So we decided to close the fed and move on to other endeavors. (As an interesting side note: Pedro and I ended up being in two more feds together, the WWA and the NCWA.)

After a few months of concentrating solely on schoolwork, I felt the "e-fed bug" bite me again. I looked for another fed to join and settled on the WWA. My character, Tigress, quickly secured a top-ranking spot and the women's title. There was also a discussion board where handlers would discuss things out-of-character, such as the WWF, roleplaying strategy and favorite food. On this board, I started responding frequently to posts made by Chris Ingersoll, the handler of Vyolynce. His posts were thoughtful and well-worded, which I respected. For a while, we practically ruled the discussion board with our banter before we took it to Email and chat.

The initial contact with Chris occured on Jan. 20, 1999 (assumed to be our "anniversary"). My first formal feud in the WWA was against Razorblade and his valet Victoria. Unfortunately, their handler took the game a little too seriously and deservedly got smacked around for his in-character posts on the discussion board. The funniest smack was from Chris, who responded with his own in-character post and ended it with a "let's keep it in the roleplays" message. I was having a particularly bad day and expressed my appreciation at the amusement. His first Email to me started a long series of evenings spent talking to each other via Email or chat, often into the wee hours of the morning.

During the first few weeks of our acquaintance, I noted that some of the angles that I was currently working on were getting stalled due to the other handlers' non-cooperation or just plain disappearing, so I approached Chris about doing an angle. Unlike many of the handlers of the WWA, Chris was receptive to my ideas. The original premise of the angle was to use Tigress as a catalyst to start a "stable war" between our respective stables. However, since the other handlers in my stable were unreceptive to the bait they were being thrown, we turned it into a fued between Vyolynce and Tigress.

The angle quickly became a love story between the two characters, where Vyolynce would torment Tigress under his ring persona, only to have her run to his arms for comfort while he was unmasked. As our characters grew closer, so did we. After doing our pow-wow session over the next step in our angle, we would talk of other things and found that we had much in common. Some nights we even ended up having "cyber makeouts" and set up times to meet over chat. We were essentially dating. Though he was camera-shy, he also agreed to send me a picture so I could put a face with the words I saw on the screen. (And I was impressed that he was good-looking!)

One day, Chris said that he was going to visit me for my birthday. At first, I thought that he was joking, but he told me the date he would arrive, the gate and the flight number. By then, I was pretty confident that he was not a knucklehead that would say that he was coming and not show up or a psycho that would leave me dead in a gutter, but I would be lying if I said I didn't have a few doubts as I prepared to make the hour-long drive to the airport on July 26th. But he showed up and didn't kill me, so we spent a very happy week together.

This was the same day that Chris told me that he loved me. It came as a bit of a shock to me, but I decided not to say anything for fear of hurting his feelings and to see if he meant it. Later on, he surprised me by taking a job offer about an hour away from where I lived and moving from Massachusetts to North Carolina. He stated later that his reason was to be with me. So I realized that he was telling the truth, instead of paying lip service to the often-abused phrase.

So as I prepared for my junior year, Chris moved down and we have been together ever since. During my parents' messy breakup and legal battles and a year of unemployment, Chris was there through all the drama that characterized my life immediately after. He has been the rock that has kept me stable and taught me what true love is. There's a reason I call him my "Dark Angel!"