well said.

My husband and I started dating in college and were together for four years before we got engaged. It seems like a long time but we are veeeeeeery cautious people (especially my husband!) and there was a bit of long-distance during that time before we both ended up at the same grad school. We had a 5-month engagement and were married last year when we were 24 (almost 25). We didn't move in together until after the wedding and we were virgins on our wedding night. Like I said we've only been married/living together for about a year but it's going swimmingly! Taking a long time to get to grow together (and grow up a bit and become independent adults) before making a decision about marriage I think worked really well for us.

Definitely the best thing we did during our engagement was extensive premarital counseling. We attended seminars, took an intensive weekend workshop, had a mentor couple, went through a book together, took a compatibility test... The whole nine yards. It gave us a long of confidence, skills, and supporting friendships that have really helped us make the transition from dating into marriage. I highly recommend counseling to any engaged or seriously dating couple (or married couple! I'm sure we'll do more in the coming years.).

I met my fiance online, a couple months after a horrible break up. and by horrible i mean he spent the night with me monday night, avoided me tuesday, and broke up with me wednesday saying 'i met someone else and it just feels right' - a week after that he took me to lunch to try to show 'we can still be friends' (i totally got wasted on his dime, on expensive drinks) and was saying 'i love you' to her on the phone, and she had called him 4 times in the span of an hour freaking out about what he might be doing with me. AWFUL. (p.s. they broke up after six months)

i digress.

my, now fiance, and i met at a public place (TGIFridays) and watched some monday night football, talked a bit, got to know each other face to face, grabbed some hot chocolate at wawa (it was 2 weeks before christmas 2008) and then went for a drive until about 2am. he was really quiet and shy, but i'm not *quite* as bad, and managed to keep the conversation going. he's very literal and mathy-sciencey. he's also in school right now to become a pastor - and i'm the kinda girl that will let fly with a perv comment just to shock him. we are such opposites in so many ways. but we have a ton in common and he's also my best friend (plus, he kinda looks like john francis daly - in my opinion).

he proposed on july 7th, and 3 days later moved 300 miles away for school. (see the ring on my profile pic! woo!). the wedding is may 21st, 2011 and we can claim a 'long distance engagement' since we will have been 2 states apart for the entire thing. i used to be so against long distance relationships and how they couldn't possibly work. but somehow we've managed to get through this without too much difficulty. we talk every night via instant messenger, for at least an hour. and he tries to be online when i'm home for my meal break. he even asks me if it's okay to go out with the guys on certain nights, so i know not to expect him until a certain time. we've got our routine, and it's amazing to me how well it clicked. we've been together over 2 years now, workin on forever!

I always feel like happy endings are for other people. I was married to a "happy and funny guy". He's great with everyone else but me.

It has been a year and a half since we separated and I have been celibate ever since. I am at the point where I don't even want another relationship. I would much rather have a child on my own via a sperm bank than to actually get into another relationship again.

So now all that I care about is making me happy and being great to myself by taking care of me. One thing that I regret is not being a better significant other to someone else in my past that was great for me. Sigh

I met my husband online. We chatted over the phone and internet for almost 2 years before meeting in person. He was my first kiss and obviously first "partner" (and only). We got married 2 weeks after meeting in person (I was 18 and he was 25), and have been married for 5 years as of last November. I also have old-fashioned beliefs, and am Christian, so I do not believe in living together or having sex with someone until you are married.

I will say our romance was a whirlwind one. Everything emotional happened fast. We knew within a couple of weeks that we wanted to marry each other, and neither one of us believes in divorce, so it's not an option. Anyway, we truly love each other, and there's no one else I would rather spend my life with. It's what we both always wanted: to find the one we were meant to be with as quickly as possible, so we could spend as much of our life together as possible.

I met my boyfriend W when I was 19 and embarrassingly drunk at a pizza shop near my college sometime after midnight. Now I'm 24 and we are finishing up our third year of living in Japan.

I was in a haggard state, half-asleep on the table, and my then-kinda-boyfriend B was there. W came in and I saw him and like that woman in "Napoleon Dynamite," just thought "I WANT THAT." I said some really awkward crap that I don't remember and we didn't have a real conversation before he left. I got the scoop from a mutual friend (not gay and single = okay!) and after shoving B out the door in the morning, logged onto Facebook and found W in seconds. I sent him a message saying "we met last night, you're cute" and was pleased to get a reply expressing mutual feelings. I quickly found an excuse to go to NYC - I believe it was a Norwegian festival - and pretended that my friends bailed so it was just gonna be me.

We met at Grand Central station and within seconds he was making really off-color jokes about eating dogs and finding lunch in trash cans. I found this incredibly endearing. The real moment of truth was when we realized we chewed the same gum (Orbit Lemon - at the time it was rare/uncommon). It was all good from there, even though I half-turned my head and ran away when he tried to kiss me at the end of the date.

We've been through ups and downs, mostly ups. Ours has always been mildly long distance, never living closer than 45 minutes' drive from each other. We agree on lots of things, but have wildly different tastes in interior decorating so we keep separate houses and plan to keep on living separately. There's a big fork in the road coming up - our work contracts end this summer and I am moving back to America no matter what. He is pursuing a music career playing in a band, and will wind up in Tokyo/Osaka, the Netherlands, or the USA. I don't want to stay in Japan but I'd consider following him to the Netherlands since living in Europe has always been something I wanted to do.

We'll see!

I love hearing everyone's relationship stories!!

krampus I love your Napoleon Dynamite reference and your "I want that" reminds me also of Liz Lemon's "I want to go to there" line. HA. Fabulous story.

mandalin I am a strong LGBTQ ally and want to applaud you and your partner's commitment even though our legal system doesn't always. Thank you for sharing your story and reminding us that we still have a long way to go in securing equal rights to marriage for all people.

My bf and I have been together for 3 years now. We started out as a fling (I had just broken up with my previous long-term boyfriend) and met while abroad on internships. We came back to the US, where he was in grad school 3 hours away from where I was living. I did NOT want to keep up the relationship (which at that point was still a summer fling) because I didn't want to be in a relationship, but he, who had never dated seriously before, was adamant. And boy am I glad! We did long-distance for 9 months while he finished grad school, were in the same city for 1 1/2 years, and now 3 years later we still in a long-committed relationship living together overseas. I'm an extremely rational/unemotional person, so for us living together for a long time and dating for a long time to explore if/when we wanted to get married was the only way to go. He's the more romantic of us, which is good, because it keeps me from being too logical about the whole relationship all the time and balances us out.

We're an interracial couple with very different family backgrounds, so that combined with living overseas always keep things interesting. Thanks, OP, for starting this thread and allowing all of us to share our stories... reminds me how lucky and grateful I am!

I dated a guy in high school and afterward for 6 years. I thought I was going to marry him and make babies and all that jazz, even though it was an unhealthy relationship (in hindsight and at times during it.) We broke up. Then I dated a guy for 3 years, and it was not a great relationship all the time either. We broke up and about 2 weeks later a casual acquaintence/friend of mine sent me a "boyfriend application" on Myspace. Yes, seriously... ha ha. He invited me up for the weekend so he could help me burn pictures of the ex and just have a great time!

By Sunday we were "committed" and determined that while we'd only casually known each other for a little over 2 years, we'd had crushes on each other in our "off" times of our other relationships but the timing never worked out.

3 weeks later, he "accidentally" proposed to me. But he meant it and I said yes.

3 months later he officially proposed to me, and a year later we were married.

This May will be our 4th marriage anniversary.


So... pretty much it doesn't always work out the way you see it, and sometimes it just feels so right. Saying "yes" to this man, while fresh out of a 3-year relationship (and probably still reeling from the 6-year one), was the easiest decision I've ever made in my life and I haven't spent a single moment regretting it. It hasn't all been roses either, I questioned myself many times but quickly realized it was irrational thinking I was questioning, not our relationship.

**I should add that I'm super Type A and cannot make a decision to save my life usually- even ordering off a menu somewhere takes me 20 minutes! So to just know it in my heart and jump into marrying my now husband being easy says a LOT!

Me too! I am hyper-rational, so I'm happy to hear some people are able to follow their heart sometimes.... gives me hope for myself

Like, like, like! Where's the like button? LOL!

I'm just a little passive aggressive, and one of my favorite things to do is slip gay rights type comments into conversations with people I know are against it. It cracks me up to watch them squirm. My brother, whom I absolutely adore, must agree to disagree on this one issue. My aunt was finally married in Boston a few years ago to woman she'd been partners with for over twenty years.

What is wrong with monogamy people?

I am the same way. I didn't mention the part of my story where my husband moved 1600 miles away right before we started dating. So our choice was to either have him move back or both of us move to a mutual state close to where he was living. We chose both of us moving. Moving 1600 miles for a guy after 5 months of dating was definitely the craziest thing I ever did but it all worked out.

My husband and I dated for two years before he proposed, got married and moved in together a year later. We waited until we were married to have sex (though he had other partners before our relationship) and so we didn't move in together until we were married. The crazy thing about it is that we had a long distance relationship all the way up until the point of our marriage and had never even lived in the same town before we got married. Our honeymoon was the longest amount of time we had ever spent together in a row. It has worked out really well though- our 5 year wedding anniversary is coming up in June I'm just as happy as the day we got married. We've had our share of difficult times- starting off our marriage working for a camp in subpar housing with below minimum wage pay, living apart for work for a year and a half, 2 layoffs, career changes, etc. but it's all been worth it. I think we put in a lot of work- counseling before we got married, lots and lots of communication (long distance will do that to you!) and honesty about what we needed and expected. It also helps that we got "lucky"- we're highly compatible people with very similar interests, life goals, and views on just about everything from the unimportant and average (what foods we like and what color we paint our house) to the very large and important (how many people are out there who want to adopt teenagers instead of having biological children, especially at our age) In short- I think I'll keep him

Wow, that sounds so much like my relationship. We went nearly two years just talking over the phone/internet. He lived in CA, and I in TN. It's nice to see other people putting that same kind of devotion into a relationship, because it is pretty hard to have a long-distance relationship when everyone else (especially since I was in the high school at the time) is rubbing it in your face that they can talk to their significant other face-to-face. But, like you said in your post, we ended up having a much deeper connection because of all the talking did since we were long-distance.

Congrats on your anniversary!

oh my god i am literally in stitches!!