This is just a short page about my wonderful wife, Yolanda. I met Yolanda through mutual friends online — yes, the great wide world of Internet relationships. At least, it started out that way, but unlike many of them, has proceeded quite nicely.
I never intended to get involved with anyone online, let alone in a foreign country. It all happened rather unplanned but once it had started I was pretty powerless to stop it — not that I wanted to.
Yolanda is from a town called Whyalla in South Australia, which is right down on the bottom edge of Australia and on the coastline. When we met, it was just friendly chat and hanging out online, mostly on my talker. [GRANDPA MODE] Back in the day, kids, we didn’t have cellphones, apps, texting, sexting, instant messagers, etc. — we could only do email or a typing-only (no pictures, not even emojis!) style of chatting on things called MUSHes, MUDs, etc. Basically little programs running on servers that would let people log in and talk back and forth. Being a programmer and computer geek, I was able to setup one of these and modify it to my own curious whims and cultivate a large community of people from around the world, chatting about various things, and generally just hanging out.
Yolanda and her friend happened upon my talker quite by accident one night — it was common to jump around to various talkers just to see who was around. I apparently completely ignored her the first night, but she caught me the second night, and we started talking. A lot. Those chats eventually led to asking lots of questions about each other in the form of “20 Questions” and then to phone calls. I swear she must have spent a mint in phone calls for those first few months that we talked — thank goodness Aussie telephone rates are good. At any rate, I found myself often staying up late so we could talk, as the time difference sometimes made it difficult to chat otherwise.
She had visited the USA several times as a camp counselor so she had already been over here previous summers to camps in Connecticut and others. So, she lined up a camp in Michigan and came over to go there with all intentions of visiting me after the summer, but my friends conspired to bring her to Iowa before camp started and we met when they invited me over for dinner and she was just sitting at the dining room table. Well, hello there!
Things went very well once we got past the initial oddness of the situation. It is incredibly odd and yet strangely familiar to finally meet someone which, until then, you have only communicated via voice and typewritten text. We hung out until she had to leave for her camp.
We flew to Australia at the end of 2003 and met her family and friends, etc. One night on the moonlit beach I got down onto one knee and asked Yolanda to marry me, and she luckily said, “Yes.” I had to leave her there to return to the States and get back to my job — we hadn’t had the money to purchase her a ticket with me back, so we had a very tearful goodbye at the airport. I sobbed hard almost all the way to Adelaide as I watched her leaning against the airport fence as the plane pulled away. I have never done anything so hard in my life and I hope I never have to do it again. My heart was wrenched from its roots that day that I left her.
Fortunately, by the beginning of 2004 we were able to afford to bring her back to the States and we got married then and settled down in Sheffield. YAY!
Some of the best things in life are the ones you never expect, and this is certainly one of them. Yolanda is my best friend and my best love all in one, and I’m so very thankful that she loves me and likes me for who I am. I am truly blessed with her.
Come what may…I will love you till my dying day.