I feel the need to preface this story with the reminder that I did, indeed, end up marrying this guy and plan on being with him until we are both saggy and wrinkly. Also, if you missed the first part of the series, you can read it here.

By some the first two years of a relationship are considered to be the initial “honeymoon” period when someone walks around with as much of their partner’s saliva in their mouth as their own (gross but very true) and little relationship problems get brushed away in the heat of the moment. For the most part this was true of my relationship with the added bonus that I was dating a pale basement dweller with a penchant for Doritos and Bawls.

I had always been a closet Sci-fi geek and all around nerd so I tucked away my own judgment on his lifestyle and walked into the relationship with an open mind. This last thing is probably the main ingredient in the recipe for success with a gamer-type… For some reason still unbeknownst to me five years later Matt, now my husband, asked if he could pay my way to take a beach vacation with him and his family. He said that he could easily afford this through his earnings from FPS tournament winnings and plus he couldn’t expect me to have sex with him since his family was there, so why not I thought. A few weeks later it seemed that I had made the right decision when we decided to end our platonic relationship and start dating.

To my dismay, year 1 was dominated by highly caffeinated LAN parties at his house. At this point my extent of computer usage was chatting on AIM with my girlfriends so any attempt that I made at actually playing a game was laughable. Thus I situated myself into the sideline girlfriend position and readied for Year 2.

At the start of Year 2 we both moved out of our hometown and into separate places. Being only a mile away from each other made our separation only 15 minutes but as time went on it started to seem like a much larger gap than that. He began playing FPS games much less this year and devoted his energies to the World of Warcraft instead. Always the type to want to get ahead in seemingly intelligent ways, he botted his characters to farm gold and experience points to reach level 60 – getting his account banned at least two times in the process. As he sunk more and more time into this immersive MMO he started using the distance between us as an excuse to play more games.

Still keeping an open mind I determined to fix this problem by starting my own account. Sometime in 2005 I created the troll priest Orestia, because Matt played Horde and I considered a female troll to be the prettiest option that didn’t require me to play in what I then thought of as a scary zombie level, the undead starting area. Being a big newb I didn’t realize the time and effort that it would take me to reach level 60 to spend more time with, err I mean raid, with my boyfriend. Luckily I met a few friendly players that temporarily distracted me from Matt’s excessive playtime

After months of calmly pointing out what he was doing, his chivalry and affection were still lacking to the point that I decided to bring the ultimatum of “change or I’m gone.” The solution we came up with was to move in together. The result of which was fat asses and big “played time” numbers but, more about that in my next post!

More to come in a week or so, I have a wedding anniversary cruise to attend!

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