Our story

Tom Catherine I started going to the Colorado School of Mines in August of 1998, and on the first day of class made friends with a guy named James. He and I both played a game called Descent, and over lunch we decided to look for levels on KoolBear's website (which I'd remembered from the past.) I noticed a link from there to the DescentBB, and decided to investigate. I started posting messages and asking questions and became reasonably well-known (though not very popular) under the name "Lothar". One day, someone posted a message asking everyone to describe themselves, and my eye was drawn to a message by "Drakona", who had mentioned she was a girl (a rarity in the gaming world) and was into math. I took notice of her almost immediately, and became more interested as I learned more about her -- she was a Christian, good at math, into origami, wrote poetry, and seemed to be like me in almost every way. I said so at one point, much to the amusement of the hundreds of people on the DescentBB -- "you sound like a female version of me." A while later, about February of 1999, my friend George happened to see her online and knew I was interested in meeting her, so he asked her if she would open up another chat program to come meet me. She agreed, and we talked for a little while, and thus began our friendship. We began e-mailing each other several times a week, and I started saying some sweet things in posts on the DBB. Two of the other members, who went by SoulVoid and Mr. Hat, started teasing us by joking that we'd get married some day. Though I'm sure they weren't serious, it was quite a prophetic joke. Tom and I first met online, and I first knew him by his online name, "Lothar", and he knew me at first, only as "Drakona". This was somewhere in the fall of '98, during my sophomore year of college. I was an enthusiast of a particular video game--"Descent"--and played it online constantly (far more than my parents liked!). Tom liked the game a bit too, but didn't play online much. He mostly went to discussion forums and wrote. So we met in a discussion forum devoted to Descent--the Descent Bulletin Board, or DBB for short--where I came mostly for the Descent, and Tom came mostly for the discussion. Friends have since commented that Tom and I are amazingly similar. We certainly thought so at first! The first words I remember him saying to me are, "Wow, you're like a female version of me!" I laughed, but agreed it seemed very much so. I remember one of the first things he did to impress me during that time. I am quite an enthusiast of origami, and had designed a very difficult model--the origami pyro (the ship used in Descent)--and had published it online at my web site. Many origami veterans had attempted the model and had difficulty, and no newcomers to the art had made it past the first dozen steps. But Tom worked a very long time, and came to me for help at last, with nearly half the model done--an amazing feat! I was quite impressed! Where we met Blossoming Friendships As we talked more and more, I began to trust her, and I happened to see her online one evening in late May when I really needed prayer. I asked her to pray for me, and we talked for a while about some of the sin I'd been into, and she shared a bit about her own life as well. We both needed much prayer at that time, and God blessed us both immensely over the next few months as we continued to pray for each other. We began praying for each other and helping each other deal with life's difficulties and our own sins, and we both saw immediate results. By the end of summer, we had both changed immensely for the better. One night in August, our fledgeling friendship nearly came to an end after I'd done something she didn't like and she reacted angrily. I wanted to leave, because I was sure I was going to be hurt, but I heard God clearly speak one word to me: STAY. Despite all of my defense mechanisms telling me to flee, I obeyed the Lord and stayed put. By the end of the night we'd both learned some powerful lessons about forgiveness, and I'd realized I truly loved the girl on the other end of the modem. Within a week we'd written several letters to each other, and decided we were now boyfriend and girlfriend. We started "dating" online, meeting to play Descent or just to talk, and the next month we started studying the Bible together. We kept praying for each other, and I could see God's work in my life every day. We talked online and emailed, laughing together about the many things we had in common--for one, we were both extreme nerds. But our friendship grew slowly. We were both Christians, but both of us had difficulties and problems in the relationship with God. We spent a lot of time talking together and helping each other--and not a very easy time, for we were both badly sinful. But in the end, God worked a miracle, and Tom became the deepest friend I had. Near the end of the summer before my junior year, Tom and I became romantic after a brutally honest talk with a tender ending. Through the end of the summer and the beginning of my studies at the University of Washington, we exchanged letters and emails, and talked frequently online. We started an online Bible study, originally with the purpose of keeping my thinking straight in the midst of extremely liberal UW. In the end, it sparked a rapid growth spurt for both of us, and firmly placed God in the center of our relationship. Tom's first glimpse of Catherine Plans to Meet Catherine and I would spend three hours per night talking to each other online, and we decided it would be a good idea to meet. I decided I'd try to make the trip to Spokane, where she lived, over that Christmas. Many e-mails, web searches, chats, and phone calls went into the planning process, and when all was said and done I'd secured permission from her family to stay with them for a little while over Christmas vacation. Catherine's first glimpse of Tom In the next couple months, we became very serious about each other. We were both glad our relationship had developed online, as we could be sure our love was not physically based. Still, we decided we needed to meet in person before going any farther. So it was agreed that Tom would come to visit my family in Spokane that Christmas. The Thanksgiving beforehand was filled with encouraging--if sometimes nervously encouraging--relatives, all wondering and joking about what my online boyfriend would be like. I admit even I was terribly nervous about finding out! Christmas Together I flew to Spokane on December 18, 1999 and dressed as brightly as I possibly could, to be sure I'd be easy to recognize. I let Catherine know I'd be wearing red sweatpants, a yellow shirt, and a red Santa hat, and that I'd be carrying a teddy bear. I was so nervous about meeting her that I made sure to find an airsick bag as soon as I boarded the plane, just in case. By the time I finally got to Spokane I was shaking like crazy, so nervous and excited I couldn't possibly hold still. As I walked off of the plane, I saw Catherine for the first time, just a glimpse over the heads of the people in front of me as I reached a high point on the walkway. I recognized her instantly from a picture she'd sent me, and my heart almost stopped when I actually saw her in person. My brain went wild with thoughts of "well, this is it, no turning back" and "wow, she's pretty" and "I gotta throw up" and "all right, this is cool!" After a few seconds, my brain also remembered it's responsible for making my lungs work, so I thought I should start breathing again, which made the walk up into the airport a little bit easier. Finally the crowd parted as I came into the terminal, and there she was right in front of me, looking more beautiful than I'd imagined and more nervous than I'd expected. I hugged her and handed her a stuffed dragon she later dubbed "Boffo", and then we both walked down to meet her father closer to the parking lot. I was still trembling visibly, and didn't relax until about two days later. I'd never kissed a girl before, so I was nervous about that, too, and didn't work up the courage to kiss her for a few hours. As the week went on, we grew more and more comfortable with each other, so that by mid-week her brother John saw me sitting with my arm around her and commented that "you two haven't moved for two hours!" I also got to know the rest of the Catlins a little bit, and by the end of the week had earned their trust enough to take Catherine out on a real date (also the first in my life.) We went to Clinkerdaggers and had a wonderful time. By the end of the week I was sure I wanted to marry her. We set out on our first date The day of Tom's arrival in Spokane, I was so nervous I thought I would throw up! I knew I very much loved Tom online, but what would he be like in person? My dad drove me to the airport, and then left me in the terminal to wait for Tom. We had told each other beforehand what we would wear, for identification. I'll never forget what I saw coming into the terminal toward me: Tom in bright red sweatpants, a bright green shirt, holding a teddy bear! I was taken aback--he looked, well... silly. But I was glad to see him. He had brought me a stuffed dragon as a present (I love dragons!) and I had brought him a hug. We walked out of the terminal almost too nervous to talk, but Tom far worse than me. My dad played comic relief wonderfully, for we soon found him wearing a giant black wig! As we drove home, Tom and I nervously holding hands, my dad broke the tension and kept us talking. Tom and I first meet The week Tom spent for Christmas seemed like a month! My nervousness the first day--who WAS this weird guy?--quickly faded as I found him just as sweet in real life as online. Our first date was wonderful and romantic. Tom dressed up, but still his silly self peeked through his Winnie the Pooh tie. We went out to a fancy restaurant, and talked all evening. It was wonderful! Growing Romance Though I was sure I wanted to marry Catherine, I wanted to wait to ask her until she'd had more time to think about it. So, after Christmas I started planning the perfect proposal for sometime during the summer. I thought of waiting until her 18th birthday, and setting up the perfect date at a nice restaurant, and I had this big speech prepared. Things didn't turn out quite the way I expected, though. One day, a friend of mine who went by "SolidAir" on the DescentBB asked me a question I totally didn't expect: "Does Drakona's father know you want to marry her?" I wasn't sure why SolidAir knew this, or if he was just guessing, but I decided to give him a definite answer. "I don't know" I said, "but I can find out. He's online right now." So, I sent a message over to Jim that read something like this: "My friend wants to know if you know I want to marry Catherine." There was dead silence for about five minutes, and I had a flashback to the first family picture Jim had ever sent me (he was holding a machine gun...) It turns out he'd left the room for a few minutes, but when he came back his response was "consider me forewarned." It wasn't exactly permission, but it also wasn't forbidding, so I figured I was pretty safe in actually proposing. That night, I told Catherine what had happened, because I'd found it so amusing. She responded by telling me that someone coming through the line where she worked as a cashier had responded to a kind act of hers by jokingly saying "you're so sweet. Will you marry me?" She had nearly responded "sorry, I'm already engaged" but caught herself and said "seeing someone" instead of "engaged". Knowing she fully intended to say "yes" when I proposed made me a lot more confident in doing so, and so I started thinking about doing so a little bit earlier than I'd planned before. A couple of days later, March 4 2000, we played a 2 on 2 Descent match with Wolf and Capm, another couple who were dating at the time (by my advice.) The match had been planned for quite some time, and Catherine and I had practiced quite a bit. We won the match pretty solidly (demos are available for those who'd like to see it) and then afterwards we all stayed in chat for a while talking. Wolf and Capm were a little upset with each other, and so Catherine and I, without a word to each other, teamed up to help them calm down. The way we worked together both in the game and in chat afterwards made us more sure that we should get married. In the months that followed, Tom hinted that he would ask me to marry him. Though I didn't know it at the time, my parents already suspected he would (in fact, my mom predicted Valentine's Day). Knowing that he planned to spend the summer in Spokane, I expected him to ask at the beginning of the summer. I thought often of it, sometimes certain I would marry him and sometimes skeptical, certain I still had months in which to decide. Our relationship grew by leaps and bounds. One discussion board started by a mutual friend (Goobers R Us) had constant religious debates in which we participated together. Our respect for each other grew, as we worked together to respond to questions. Tom's role on the board was the one of supreme leadership--administrator--and mine was one of minor leadership, a moderator of a busy forum. My respect for him grew greatly as I watched him shape the place, and my love for him even more, as we worked together. I felt certain I would marry him! Tom's first glimpse of Jim Jim as Tom knew him later The Proposal By the night of March 7, we'd both decided it was kind of silly to have said that I was going to propose and she was going to accept, but to not have acted on it. So, I asked her: I hadn't counted on the fact that a response to a serious proposal has to be much more certain than the response to my story a few days earlier, and so for the next half-hour we talked and prayed without committing. Finally, Catherine responded: Notice the time stamps! Suffice it to say, that was the most nerve-wracking half-hour of my life. One late night in early March, we had been talking about how much we loved working together online. We joked about marriage, and then Tom surprised me by asking me on the spot. I was terrified--I thought I still had months to decide! I turned away from the question on the computer screen and took a half an hour to pray and ponder. But after a long pause, I returned with my answer: yes. Tom tells me he had to restrain himself to keep from waking his family with a shout! Spreading the Word The next morning we started to spread the word to family and close friends, and in a few days we decided to post an announcement online, rather than trying to tell everyone individually. The response we got was phenomenal, and a lot of people gave us really good advice. We were even interviewed for PyroPlay, an online radio show hosted by two Descent players who lived a short drive away from me. Toward the end of May, I drove up to Spokane to spend the summer there, and the first weekend I took Catherine to a LANfest to play some Descent. We were both surprised to find that some people identified us when we walked in the door from our voices. Apparently many of them had heard our story from the interview on PyroPlay, and remembered what we sounded like. This all happened in the middle of finals week for me, and while I was overjoyed, I was also terrified at what I had done, and certainly had very little energy to devote to studying for exams! It was a frazzled Catherine that called home to give her family the news, and it was excellent advice my mom gave. "Now, put one foot in front of the other and focus on the task at hand." Walking itself was a challenge, not to speak of taking advanced mathematics finals! Tom and I were still very deeply involved in Descent, though we no longer are, and the place where we met was still very active and fun, though it has lately fallen into disrepair. After securing approval from both our families, we announced our engagement there. It caused no small stir, and an online radio show even interviewed us on account of it! (One question they asked: "What about the ring?" Tom had decided to give it to me when he saw me at the beginning of summer.) The Story of the Ring I started working for EPS that summer, in order to pay for a room in Spokane and hoping to save enough money for an engagement ring. I hadn't bought one before I proposed online (oddly enough!) and so I wanted to get one before the end of the summer, to make the engagement really complete and to convince those who didn't think we were serious that this was, in fact, for real. So, I got official permission from Jim and Dorothy to marry Catherine (I expected quite a discussion, but Jim just told me to "go for it".) Then I ordered a beautiful diamond ring from www.bluenile.com I'd planned to give Catherine the ring at the start of August, and worked with her parents to make sure I'd have it before they left on family vacation to the Oregon coast (some 500 miles away.) Unfortunately, there was a problem somewhere on the supply chain and so the ring was delayed. So, I made plans with Jim and Dorothy to instead join the family mid-vacation, give Catherine the ring, and then bring her back to Denver to meet my parents. Sean Priest with Blue Nile did a lot of work trying to get the ring I'd ordered to me, but the suppliers couldn't deliver it on time. Finally, after a few weeks and countless e-mails wherein I'd explained my situation, he saw that I wasn't going to get the ring in time to give it to Catherine unless it was shipped out that night. So, he called around and eventually was able to have a similar (but better) ring custom-made and sent to me via FedEx overnight. Summer in Spokane Over Tom's first summer in Spokane, he got to know my family very well. We had told few people offline about our engagement. Our ages (17 and 19) and lack of a ring made it hard to take seriously--and even my mom didn't until the end of summer. Though we turned 18 and 20 over the course of the summer, no ring appeared early on, and I quickly gave up watching and decided to wait and see what Tom would do. The summer itself was thoroughly romantic. We exchanged poems and love notes constantly, and became very deep friends. Tom got to know my family very well, and I was pleased that they seemed to very much like each other. I had checked out an origami book from the library, and was delighted to discover one of the models was a little box with a heart on the lid. I made a tiny one--barely a square inch--of bright red foil, and gave it to Tom with a tiny dolphin inside (his favorite animal). I very much wanted to meet Tom's family. I felt I didn't quite know what I had gotten into by agreeing to become a Darrow, and was anxious to find out. So it was arranged that I would go on my family's summer vacation to the Oregon coast while Tom finished his summer job. Then he would pick me up in Oregon, we would return to Spokane for a few days, and then he and I would go down to Denver together. Making it Official I got the ring on Friday morning, and then drove all the way from Spokane to Tillamook that afternoon. I'd put the ring in an origami box with a heart on top that Catherine had made for me (since the instructions for the box said "perfect for engagement rings" I'd thought she was sending me a hint!) When I got to where the Catlins were staying, I took Catherine for a walk up a sand dune, clutching the ring tightly for fear I'd drop it in the sand and lose it. Because of this, she was up the dune long before me, and had already sat down looking at the ocean. John and Anne were both nearby, and so I waited for them to leave before I gave the ring to Catherine. During this time, she'd been playing in the sand and totally blackened her hands on an old burnt-out log. When I gave her the ring, her eyes lit up like fire. She was totally surprised, though her whole family and half of her church knew the ring was coming. Someone joked that she was the only person in Eastern Washington who didn't know the ring was coming. She tried to slip the ring on, and realized it was a size too small (due to an oversight in the rushed custom-manufacturing process.) So, she and I came down the dune to show her parents this beautiful diamond ring, on the wrong finger on her dirty hand. We thought it looked kind of silly, but Dorothy told us "diamonds NEVER look silly." We go the ring properly sized a few days later, and it turned out looking quite beautiful. It was nearly the end of my summer with Tom. We were down on the beach in Oregon, with my family. There was a beautiful sand dune there, stretching up high over the beach. One face of it was a sheer cliff, with a beautiful view of the ocean. Tom, my brother John, and I climbed the dune, and threw clods of sand over the cliff, playing around. Finally John wandered off, and I sat making patterns in the sand with Tom. Tom began talking about having asked my father's permission to marry me--in earnest, now. I was flattered that he would do such a thing, but was downright astonished when he handed me a tiny paper box of bright red origami paper with a little heart on top, which contained the most beautiful ring I had ever seen. Atop the cliff overlooking the ocean, Tom sat absolutely silent--and I answered the question he didn't ask by sliding the ring onto my finger and giving him a kiss. Tom and Catherine near Denver Epilogue Of course, this isn't the end of our story. It is only the end of the beginning, the end of what we've written here for you. As we embark on our lives together, we'll have many more tales to tell, many more parts of our lives to share, and our story will forever improve as God leads us through this life together. In the week that followed, we announced our engagement to the church in Spokane--Valley Bible Church--and began the countdown to the start of our life together. A Descent-themed 20th birthday for Tom