Steve and I met each other in 1993 on a single parents bulletin board on the online service Prodigy. I was a single Mom of two kids, living in Augusta, Georgia and a full time graduate student. Steve was a single Dad in Indianapolis raising his teenage daughter. There were about 40 or 50 single parents posting on that bulletin board at the time. Steve & I were just friends, along with everyone else.
Then in April 1993, Prodigy announced a giant rate increase. Many of the single parents there decided to move together to another online service (GEnie) which was very different from the first one and takes a little more computer skills to learn to use. Steve and I are both fairly computer literate (he works with computers), so we found ourselves working together a lot to help our friends learn their way around the new place and get used to it. We began e-mailing each other often as we (and others) helped our single parent friends make the move and adjust. One thing led to another (as they often do!), and before long we found ourselves interested in a lot more than just friendship.
One morning, hours before I was to take a major exam, I recieved yet another e-mail from Steve. But this one was different. It started off with a lot of the technical computer stuff which we usually e-mailed back and forth, but at the end of this particular letter, Steve said "I was wondering if you were involved with someone, if you are not wanting to get involved with someone, or if possibly you might want to get involved with me". I e-mailed back the reply "yes" and included my phone number. After a lot of e-mailing, and a lot of phone calls, we decided we really needed to meet face to face. We only had a weekend, and we live 750 miles apart, so we decided to meet half way between. Steve got out a map, and just picked a town - Jellico, Tennessee . It turned out to be a beautiful little town, nestled in the mountains. And that weekend turned out to be everything we had hoped it would be! We spent a lot of time in Jellico during the next year.
Shortly after we became romantically involved with each other, we made another online service change - to Delphi where we were co-hosts of The Single Parents Network SIG, a Special Interest Group which we created as a support group and a cyberspace "home away from home" for our single parent friends.
We announced our engagement to our online single parent friends in September 1993, and on July 3rd 1994, we were married in the same little town in which we first met -- Jellico. The wedding was a wonderful gathering of online friends. Many of our online single parent friends traveled from all over the U.S. to attend. They came from Maryland, Ohio, Illinois, Arizona, New York and Florida among other places.
These days meeting a future spouse online is rather common but in the early 90's it was still unusual enough that USA Today included our story (and our photograph) in a article published in February 1994 on online romance. Click here to read the article.
Steve and I currently operate jellico.com, Inc. -- our own Internet Access Service.
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