In December of 2000 I was living with a guy that I’d met online 3 years earlier. While our relationship had started off quite nicely, after about a year it began to die, until eventually we were living together simply because it was easier to do that than find separate apartments. At that time, I was regularly posting to my Lvejournal and through a mutual friend, I was introduced to this Canadian guy, Eddie. I quickly developed a huge crush on him, even though he was involved with another girl at the time.
After a month or so, I admitted that I had feelings for him, and shortly after, he confessed he had a crush on me as well. I’d been planning on taking a vacation to Florida, but after seeing how cheap airfare to Vancouver was, I changed plans and visited Eddie for a week. To say that I had a good time would be an understatement. While some people who meet online have a terrible time being together face-to-face, Eddie and I spent every minute together, walking through the city and having a blast. I was happier than I had been in years, and spent the better part of an hour crying my eyes out on the plane on the way home.
A couple of weeks after my trip, after having only known him for about 6 months at the most, Eddie proposed to me for the first time (there were 3 proposals), online. I didn’t believe him; we’d joked about getting married, or at least moving him down here, but until then it didn’t seem real. But I said yes anyway (the 2nd proposal was over the phone later that night).
We immediately made plans for him to come down to visit Rhode Island, which he did. He proposed to me on that visit, during Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and we were married about a year later on August 10, 2002.
That’s not to say that there weren’t a few snags along the way. We, like perhaps most of the world, thought that if you married a US citizen you got a greencard. It seemed so simple! We made plans for him to come down in January of 2002, and since Canadian citizens can legally stay in the US for up to 6 months, we planned on getting married at some point a couple of months after he arrived. However, while making that fateful trip, he was denied entry into the US because they believed that he had no plans to return to the motherland. He was told that he was not to attempt to cross without the proper papers, and sent back to where he came from.
We made plans to get him down here by way of a K-1 (fiance) visa, and started getting the forms filled out. We filed everything in March, and by May we’d been approved for a consulate interview in July. On July 10th he had his interview and got the visa, and flew in on the following day. A month later we were married.
