Chapter 1: October 25th, 2010

Today is a marked day for us. I wasn't going to write about it or tell the story for fear of the general public thinking our decisions over the past year were brash or unwise, but all day I've been marveling at  the beautiful changes in my life that started one year ago today,  so I guess opinions don't really matter.  On this day last year, I found Tim.

On October 25th, 2010 at 4:39pm, I was doing what I do a lot; browsing a photography blog. The Smiley Face Collective had a beautiful post and I left a comment.  

After I submitted the comment, I glanced at the other comments in the box and saw the name "tim tab" above mine, and I thought that was very odd. When people use funny internet aliases instead of their proper names, I just think it's dumb. So I clicked on the dumb alias to see who this person was. It led me to another photo blog. 

The pictures were exceptional, so I looked through a few posts. Pretty soon I started seeing wedding pictures from France. This really grabbed at my attention because I grew up in France and I have never seen particularly good photography of French lifestyles. I haven't been back to France since I was 11, so my memories were in a time warp and these pictures were opening up a new understanding for me of how young people do life and weddings in France. I was fascinated, so I expressed my appreciation through another comment on this Tim Tab's blog (this timestamp is an hour off,  I really left the comment at 4:47 pm)

After that, I switched over to the photographer's profile to find out who this person was. 

I had to read it a few times to fully grasp that there was a real person living on this earth who had that resume of life experiences. This guy was around my age, worked my dream job, went to the same university that my dad graduated from--which I had been hearing about my whole life--to study the same degree that I got, and he grew up in France, just like me. Besides that, he appeared to be a highly motivated, hard-working person to own his own business at the age of 24. He seemed very down to earth, and had a goofy sense of humor that made me chuckle condescendingly. And he was very, very cute.
I sat back from the computer screen and wondered what was going on. It was all very strange and frustrating. This little bio was the most fascinating one way conversation I've had in my life: he had laid out the basics of his story and there was no way I could respond. He lived 8 hours away and we had no friends in common (although I found out later that we did).
I decided that the best thing to do was forget those 20 minutes of internet snooping because they would only drive me crazy. Tim Tab, whatever his real name was, was a figment of the internet and not anyone I could actually meet, so that was it.
Later that evening,  I went to hang out with Amy and Natalie. We made pumpkin cookies, ate way too many, and then had a "pute hang" where we sat around in their living room on our computers, browsing and chatting. I checked my email and my heart about stopped when I opened this:

He was flirting with me. I just knew it. He must have followed the link I left to my blog and figured out that we had everything in common and surely he was just trying to start a real conversation. Amy insisted that he was doing nothing of the sort (and she was right) and even though he was a really good photographer, he had way too many typos on his website to be the man of my dreams. I told her, adamantly, that she was wrong and she rolled her eyes. Then I started a reply to him, smiling at the screen with my hands poised over the keyboard, not knowing what to say. This went on for about 5 days until I finally wrote him back a simple one liner, asking him what his story was and how he got to Chicago from France.

The rest is a long story, and I may tell it in a few more pieces over the next few months if anyone wants to hear it. Some simple math can tell you how fast our relationship moved: we've been married for two months already.  Our families and friends supported our decisions to get engaged after 5 months of dating, and married after 3 months of engagement. I wouldn't advise that pace for anyone else, but it was good and right for us and I wouldn't give up this precious time of already being married or the peace I have in our marriage vows for anything.

Today in honor of this anniversary (and because it really needed to be done), Tim and I changed the text and pictures of his profile to reflect the current state of Tim Tab Studios.