The Ramblings of Jenn: One Year

It's hard to believe but a year ago Monday (March 18th) Dan and I met for the first time. I'm not really sure how much I have talked about how Dan and I met.

When I decided to get back out in the dating world I knew I would end up online dating. It has worked in the past and it's something that I felt very comfortable with. I had never really used one of those dating websites, but that's not really a big deal. I chose to use OKCupid. The reason I chose that site was mostly because it was free. I just wasn't at the point that I wanted to pay for a service to find someone. One of the beauties with online dating is if there's something major that you don't like then you can immediately rule a person out - like I didn't want to date anyone who had kids... or was shorter than me.

I noticed there were some different schools of thought on the whole online dating thing. One is that you meet someone in person pretty quickly after you begin talking online to see if there's a spark in person or whatever. I understand this concept but I wasn't comfortable with it. It was never how I had done it in the past. What I like to do is build a connection online first, get to know them, build a rapport (as Susan says) and then when it feels right, decide to meet. I like to be able to talk/chat with a person and see how it flows before investing in the time to meet them. I feel like it just establishes something before you take the time to meet a person. This also helps with my anxiety as meeting a person off line made me extremely nervous (I'm a nervous person in general)

Before I met Dan I did meet one other person from OKCupid... I had a good time with him and we went on 3-4 dates... but in the end he just wasn't the right fit. I had kinda decided to lay low on the online dating at that point. I had downloaded the OKCupid app so I could tell when I got a new message. Since that website shows the last time you'd been online and I hadn't been online in almost a month at that point I wasn't receiving any messages. One random day though I did get a message and thought what the heck and checked it. That person ended up being Dan.

We messaged back and forth and exchanged cell numbers and texted back and forth. He was ready to meet me but I still wanted to chat and put off the actual meeting for awhile. I think he was starting to get annoyed with me - like she'll never meet me, but I did. We met at his apartment (worked for me, not the recommended way to meet someone online though). We hung out and watched TV and overall just had a good time. A couple of nights later we went on our first real date... and that next weekend we hung out again. I honestly wasn't expecting it to turn into a real relationship... just a kinda have fun sort of situation. We were both smitten though. I guess, the rest is history haha (that phrase is a bit lame) But it's one year from all of that and we're still together and happy. Just goes to show you never know what's going to happen, just experience life instead of planning everything.

Last night we celebrated our one year together. We went to Drunken Fish (which I've been craving for awhile now). I bought a Living Social deal for them. It was a very nice dinner. I had a glass of wine and he had a beer. We ordered the Crispy Roll, Spicy Tuna Roll, Fried Philly Roll (my fave) and the BLT Roll.

Since Drunken Fish has one of my all-time favorite desserts - we had to get that too. It's basically a strawberry cheesecake fried roll - yum!!! It comes out warm and delicious!

Don't worry, we finished it :)

I wanted to get a picture of us... but first, here's a picture from my birthday last year when he took me to the hockey game - it's our first picture together.