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Real-life Meet Cutes - Chris Tetreault-Blay

Today's guest sharing their real life meetcute is fiction author Chris Tetreault-Blay...

My wife and I are an example of internet romance gone right.  We met during 2000 when I was the tender age of 16.  I had left school in the July, had no real direction or idea of what I was doing, etc etc.  The usual teenage angst story really.  Through my best friend at the time, I was introduced to the internet and was soon spending my summer holiday days making my first online friends.  Then one August night in the Yahoo chat room ‘The Bored Room’ I received a message from Marie, the sister of another of my online friends.  It was a fluke meeting as she only started chatting to me as she ‘thought she recognised my name’ from her sisters friends list.

 
The first memory I have of when we first started chatting is the first pictures we exchanged.  I was stunned by how beautiful she was and that she was actually enjoying chatting to me!  Marie is also 11 months older than me and, back then, that was a big deal.  Had I really been able to attract a beautiful older woman?  It would seem so.  I kept a copy of that first photo for years but regrettably have since misplaced it (possibly during a hectic move after graduating from uni in 2005).  Every night I found myself rushing to the PC, which I had to time-share with my sister and her boyfriend at the time, just to see if Marie was online so that I could chat to her.  Soon enough we were both admitting that maybe there could be more between us than just being friends…
 
 
Then came the inevitable suggestion that we meet for real, which we finally did on October 8th 2000 when I made the two-and-a-half hour train journey from Basingstoke to Newton Abbot.  For me it certainly was love at first sight.  I already had feelings for her but they were just confirmed when we finally met.  That day still lives with me just as clearly as it did back then, and all I thought about on the lonely train journey home that night was just how much I wanted to go back.
 
 
We took it in turns to make monthly trips to see each other after that until we both moved to Stoke-on-Trent in 2002 to start our university life together.  When we graduated in 2005, I decided to move to Devon rather than return to Basingstoke.  I proposed to Marie that Christmas Day and we were married in 2010.  A couple of years ago, we bought our first home together and last year welcomed the birth of our boy-and-girl twins.

 
To this day I believe that her sister, Catherine, still takes credit for us being together.

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