We met somewhere in the world…
of warcraft.

So there is this video game called world of warcraft, I'm sure you've heard of it. The goal of this game is to team up with other players and kill scary monsters. In doing so, your character gains levels and becomes stronger. One day I was online and a notice appeared that someone was looking for another member for their group. I quickly sent them a message and was invited to join them to take down some ninja assassins inside a church. Sounded like fun to me. Out of 60 levels, my character, Sterla, was only in the 40s, as was everyone in the group. But what I didn't know was most of the other groups members had multiple characters (some even level 60) … and I thought I had no life. One of the other group members with multiple characters, Toredro, told us that after we finished killing ninjas he would help powerlevel the level 40 players. Well I really had no clue what this meant, but you never admit that in a video game… so I told Toredro 'that's nice, thanks' and went about my business.

After the ninjas were dead I decided it was time to log off the computer, I had forgotten completely about the offer to powerlevel, whatever that meant. As I opened up the interface to quit the game I saw a message pop up from a character named Toredro, he said 'I can help you powerlevel now'. Taking a chance at being ridiculed, I kept the game opened and asked what that meant. It turned out that he was going to use his level 60 character to help my level 40 character kill monsters faster, what a sweet deal. So I decided to stay and let this Toredro character help me.

Now I must pause here to tell you this is unusual behavior. Most video gamers are UNFRIENDLY. They will yell at you if you do not know something and they will call you names or worse if you make a mistake. This guy was instead helping me and as the days went on, he continued to help me (and another player) level our characters. We were getting closer and closer to 60 and having a fun time chatting along the way. Soon it was commonplace to login to the game and have Toredro ready to help level my character. Now in all of this chatting, we ended up learning quite a bit about eachother. For instance, Toredro learned that I was actually not a man, contrary to his prior assumption, and I learned that Toredro was a man, just like I thought. Through this interface, we became great friends.

As I'm sure you have guessed by now, Toredro was Wesley. But still, how did we start dating? Well, as chance would have it Wesley was offered a job in Chicago at the same time I was moving there for college. The rest is history.