Our Love Story

It all started in January of 2007.  Chris was living in Miami and I was in Indianapolis sharing a house with a couple of roommates.  My biggest concern was whether or not the Colts were going to win the Superbowl (they did!), while Chris knew that he would soon have to say goodbye to his dear friends in Miami to move to Nigeria for his first overseas post; he just didn't know how soon.  We didn't know each other and had no clue that in just six months, we would be married and almost immediately board a plane to Nigeria for an adventurous two years.  Many people ask how we met, and it's a question I like to dodge.  We met in an unconventional way - one that many see as unsafe or desperate.  It may have been unsafe, but I can assure you that neither Chris or I were desperate.  I had quite recently re-surrendered my life and singleness to the Lord after a year of foolish living.  For the first time in my life, I was truly content as a single woman.  My dear friend, Megan, had recently heard about an online dating website called relationships.com.  It was a Christian dating service and she had been writing back and forth with someone who seemed to be a solid Christian.  She told me I should join and I just laughed at her.  I thought something like that was silly and reserved for awkward people who couldn't meet someone in the real world.  After a week of occasionally thinking about this website and what Megan had said, I set up a profile on the website.  To get around the fee of having to pay to have your e-mail address listed on your profile, I put my myspace address on my profile so that potential suitors could write me from there (when myspace was all the rage).

Meanwhile, in Miami, Chris's friend, Matt, was telling him about relationships.com.  Chris had the same reaction as me that joining a dating website - Christian or not - was silly.  However, after a week or so, he also decided to join and create a profile.  The website gave you the option of having profiles sent to your e-mail address that were within a certain radius of your home address.  These profiles were ones that relationships.com thought would be a matching suitor based on information you had to answer when you created your profile.  Chris requested that matching profiles within 25 miles of Miami be sent to him.  For some reason, relationships.com sent Chris my profile information even though Indianapolis is much further than 25 miles from Miami!  My profile stuck out to Chris for whatever reason and he noticed my myspace address that I had listed on my profile.  He didn't have a myspace account at the time, so he set up a myspace page so that he could write me.

A month's worth of almost daily e-mail's later, Chris asked if he could fly up to Indiana to meet me over President's Day weekend.  I agreed.  I picked him up at the airport on a Sunday morning and we immediately went to church afterwards.  I should point out that we never talked on the phone prior to us meeting.  The first time I ever heard his voice or he mine was at the airport.  It kind of made everything feel like a new old-fashioned way of doing things.  We spent the short holiday weekend getting to know each other in person, and we both knew (even before we met) that we had each found the one.  We had both sought God's guidance through the writing process, had asked each other deep and penetrating spiritual questions that only someone who was likeminded could adequately answer, and we had so much in common that it was like we were old friends.  One memory that really sticks out from that first weekend is ordering food from different restaurants.  At almost every restaurant, we ordered the same thing.  At one restaurant, my #1 choice was Chris's #2, and his #2 was my #1, so we ordered both and split them.  We have since done this many times when we eat out.  The weekend when we first met was a confirming weekend for both of us in that what we thought was right was indeed right.   Chris was who he said he was, and he felt the same about me.  We hadn't tried to put on a show in our e-mails.  We were exactly how we each had pictured the other...even better!

After the initial meeting, we started traveling back and forth almost every other weekend to see each other.  He met my parents the next time he came to Indy, and they enthusiastically gave their approval.  I met his mom and two sisters one weekend in Miami and then I later met his Dad over Memorial Day weekend.  I suppose I had their approval, too, since neither opposed to us getting married!  Ha!  Over Easter weekend when it was Chris's "turn" to come to Indianapolis, he surprised me by proposing at the airport when I thought he was leaving.  When I first picked him up at the airport that weekend, he immediately disappointed me by saying he'd have to leave a day early - on Easter - because his training for Nigeria was starting a day earlier than planned.  I should note that at this time, Chris had just driven from Miami to D.C. for his 3 months of training for Nigeria, and he flew straight from D.C. to Indianapolis (after having just arrived in D.C.) to spend Easter weekend with me.  I, of course, was sorely disappointed to hear that I was going to lose a day with Chris but was trying to keep a positive attitude and not let it ruin our weekend.


After a lovely weekend with him and my family, I took him to the airport to say bon voyage until our next visit.  I usually would wait with him in line where he checks in, but he asked me to wait in the back until he was done.  I didn't understand why he was making this request, but I didn't put much thought into it since I was more focused on how sad I was that I was about to say goodbye for a couple weeks.  After Chris checked in, we walked over to the terminal (the same one where we had first met) and he asked if we could sit down for a few minutes since it was still a bit early.  I was happy for every second I could get, so we sat down and started talking.  I don't even remember what we were talking about, but then all of a sudden, Chris stood up and then got down on one knee.  He pulled out a ring box and opened it up to reveal a beautiful solitaire ring.  He used my full name for the first time, told me he loved me, and asked if I'd become his wife.  I of course said yes even though Chris claims he didn't hear me.  It probably came out in a whisper because I was so happy and so in shock!  I knew our relationship was heading in this direction, but it was still a surprise.  The surprises didn't end there, though.  The next thing I knew, I saw two of my friends coming around the corner with a travel bag. They knew about the engagement, congratulated me, and then handed me the bag.  It contained a few of my clothes and Chris explained that he was surprising me by taking me to D.C. to celebrate our engagement, to get my ring resized from the place he bought it, to pick out the wedding band, and to register for gifts.  We picked the wedding date right there at the airport because when you have a deadline to be in Africa and when you live far from your fiancee and only have 3 months to plan the wedding, you have to be flexible and maximize the time!  It turned out that the reason he didn't want me to wait in line with him was because he was also checking me in but didn't want me to know.  Earlier in the day, he had managed to get ahold of my driver's license to help accomplish this task.  Sneaky!

The next three months were spent hurriedly planning a wedding and flying back and forth as much as we could to see each other.  It's all sort of a blur.  I also had to plan for our life in Nigeria and get the many bureaucratic hurdles over with to make that happen.  We had our wedding in July and a week later after Chris's final week of training in D.C., our lives really began together in Nigeria.  Now that was a real adventure....  :-)

And they lived happily ever after....