“We met on the internet. I was on AOL Instant Messenger, and he popped in one day. He said, ‘What’s up with your last name?’ At that time, my screen name was Jenny Willis. And he said, ‘Willis is my first name.’ I thought, no way. It turns out that I knew his friends and he knew some of my friends, but we didn’t know each other.

“We continued talking for a couple of weeks, and then he said, ‘Why don’t you come by and we’ll watch the basketball game together?’ I was thinking, oh, my gosh. People kill people they meet on the internet. So I made him send me a picture of his driver’s license, but I didn’t send him any photos of me. He had no idea what I looked like. And I didn’t tell a soul I was going over there. My mom was going to think I was crazy. Well, within three months, I was living with him.

“We started our family young. I was 21, and we proceeded to do the kids, the house and the cars. Everybody said, ‘You’re pregnant, so you’re going to marry him.’ But I didn’t want to become one of those statistics where this girl had to get married because she’s pregnant.

“Crazy enough, my sons are only 11½ months apart. When the second one came along, people said, ‘Are you going to marry him now?’ Still, I wasn’t ready. Because we were already living that married life, the ring didn’t mean that much to me. At that point, I felt there was nothing more important in the world than the birth of our kids.

“When we finally did get engaged, it was so simple. We walked into the store, and he said, ‘I think we should buy the ring now.’ Nothing extravagant. And when we decided that we weren’t going to have a wedding, my mom and dad threw a fit. They were like, ‘I don’t care how many babies you have, how many houses you have. You’re going to have a wedding.’ So we ended up doing the whole wedding thing when our boys were 3 and 4.

“I kept my maiden name. So I’m Jenny Willis-Davis and he’s Willis Davis. When people see those names on our checks they say, ‘Really?’ I tell them, ‘I promise, it’s real.’ I guess it’s just one of those stories where you meet someone in the strangest places.”

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The post Meeting on the internet leads to love, then marriage appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“We met online in 2009 after she randomly added me on Facebook. Although it’s kind of shameful to admit, it was essentially an aesthetic thing. She was hot. We’re all human, you know.

“We physically met in 2012 for the first time. It was a little daunting. You have doubts, wondering whether that person is going to be a 40-year-old trucker or something. Then once you find out they are the same person, you wonder whether the relationship will translate the way it did through a keyboard. Fortunately, for us, it worked.

“I think there are a lot of negative connotations around online dating and online relationships. The way I see it, why should you settle for somebody within the 10-mile radius of where you live when there are 7 billion people on the planet? The Internet is a good tool to cast that net a little bit further. I believe the longer we think that way, the more of a social norm it can become.”

— Xander Roberts

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