Ask HN: How did you meet your spouse?

OKCupid. She made fun of me. I teased back.

Six years later, two years married, we're still happily giving each other shit.

High school chemistry partner. We never dated in high school and ended up running into each other later in college. That's when we started dating. We've been married now for 27 years.

High school "typing" class.*

(The following year, they changed the name to keyboarding. My pet dinosaur attended the elopement.)

* Ex spouse, technically.

OkCupid. Commented on a blog post she made, we started chatting on there, eventually I took a Greyhound out to meet her seven months later. Ended up moving to the US from Canada to be with her.

We started talking in 2007 and we've been married for seven great years, with a one and a half year old daughter who keeps us on our toes.

A local speed-dating event. 15 years together this upcoming February, and we have a middle-school age daughter who is a joy (I thought they were supposed to be challenging at this age?).

church

I met her on a trip during senior year of high school and I pretty much was smitten from the moment I saw her. We were playing cards and she was my partner though we didn't know each other. She talked some serious trash and was super confident and smart. After the 4 day trip, she went back to her boarding school and we wrote letters back and forth (the 90's were so quaint) with the occasional long distance phone call. We ended up attending the same college and were already dating by then. We got married many years later after growing apart and growing back together. I'm always in awe of couples who manage to stay together as they transition to adulthood. You are each very different people from start to end.

The hard work of the relationship is in being your natural selves, in maintaining open communication with your partner and yourself. You have to know what you want and communicate it to your partner and you should encourage your partner to do the same. It's very easy to build resentment and bottle those feelings up. That said, remember that beyond being the best partner you can be, you are not responsible for your partner's happiness.

Stanford engineering dormitory. She was actually in education, got her last choice for dorm assignment. One of 4 women in a 200-person dorm (CroMem). Lots of competition!

I met my wife on a dating website (plenty of fish). This is not an indicator that dating sites are effective, they had failed me for at least 10 years previously (ie I tried online dating off and on for 10 years with no success). So dating sites hadn't changed, but I had changed. Younger me wouldn't have messaged the woman who became my wife. Over time I had learned what my "must haves": job/career, independence, intelligence, compatible sense of humor.

How did I know? I have a farting problem at times, and I crop dusted a store we were in, then she did the same thing. We laughed and laughed.

She's not my spouse yet, but will be soon enough, assuming she says yes.

We were developers together at a previous job.

Best Buy. I worked as a Geek Squad agent and she worked in CD/DVDs. Found out we had similar taste in music and I won her over with my long hair and shitty rock band. 10 years ago next summer.

Met her back in elementary school...Started long distance in college, got married last year and still long distance...

In the wild 18 months prior to Tinder reaching tge tipping point (at a local beer garden).

Some people tell us we're "lucky" to have met offline, but I really think that's a pretty antiquated view and wouldn't have cared one photon if we'd met on a dating app.

Been together about 5 years. Only thing that enhances the quality of our relationship is measured honesty.

A mutual friend introduced us because she was interested in volunteering to mentor kids, and I was already doing it.

I knew because it just felt obvious. Can't really say it any other way.

Married 7 years next spring. I'd say through everything, the most important thing is, no matter how unpleasant it gets, keep communicating. Like someone else said, don't bottle things up and let resentment grow. Talk it out. Text it out, whatever it takes.

And yes, you have to put energy into making it work. You were after all two completely separate people for decades, whose lives have now merged in the most intimate way.

We met online, in 1984.

We were in college and she posted on USENET making a reference to the Foundation series. It was obvious.

I met my wife at the Barrels camp in the Paw dungeon in EverQuest. We had a good time and added each other to our friends list. As we played together more often we grew closer and became actual friends. We started a guild together (which bombed) and branched out into playing other games as well. We moved to City of Heroes and then World of Warcraft. Eventually I grew the nerve to tell her I'd fallen for her as more than a friend. It took some time but eventually she admitted that she reciprocated.

I knew she was the one when I realized that anything I played would be better with her involved. This was easily extended so that I knew anything (game or not) I did would be better with her involved. I've been proven correct so far :)

Aside: it's fun to tell people I met my wife in a dungeon, with a pause before I say "in a video game".

Edit to expand: We had our 7th anniversary in October and we were together a while before getting hitched. To answer your question, relationships take a combination of effort and initial chemistry. My wife and I had shared interests from the start which helped build a foundation to handle life's trials as we grew up together.

Sponsored by the same company through university.

We went out as a part of a group to the pub. She insulted me a lot then put her foot through a wall. What’s not to love?

Still together 30 years on.

Wouldn’t say it’s hard work. Thinking about it, there’s an old English expression “the other ‘alf” Pretty much sums it up to be honest.

Where did we meet? At church.

How did I know? Because everyone else I dated, I'd be talking to, and suddenly I'd realize that I had no idea what planet her brain was on. I just couldn't understand where she was coming from, at all. With my wife, sometimes she'd have to explain, but the explanation always showed that she was coming from somewhere I could understand.

Also, as we got closer to each other, I never hit a wall. There was never a line inside her mind or heart that I wasn't allowed to cross, to see what was behind it. She never kept a private version of her that I was excluded from. (I'm not talking physically here, I'm talking about her mind and her heart.)

> Half of me thinks that you have to work hard and be diligent to make it work, and the other half thinks it's just a matter of good interaction between your natural selves.

It's kind of both.

It better be "good interaction between your natural selves". Do you want it to be hard work? For the next 50 years? It has to be OK for you to be your natural self. You can't maintain anything else for the long term.

And yet, you do have to work at it. If you put zero effort into it, well... if you pay for nothing, nothing is what you're going to get. I found in my own marriage that, every year to year and a half, we realized that we weren't as close as we used to be, and we made a deliberate effort to rebuild. But feeling like we're still in the honeymoon phase after 20 years was worth it, definitely.

I met my wife on match.com After using at least 5 different dating sites over a 10 year period, one of them finally paid off.

for all the single guys out there, looking for a GF, here's the strategy. Write a script to copy and paste an intro paragraph and message (make sure to customize it to the profile) every girl you can possibly find, that meets your requirements. It's just a numbers game, the more you play the lottery, the greater the chance of winning. And you only need to win once, for it all to work out. Of course, these days, I expect, there's a lot more captcha's and robo detection mitigation to overcome - I mean it's preferable to bar hopping. But, I bet with some machine learning, you could optimize your response rate.

On an internet friendship website. Both of use were not really looking for love, but just someone to talk to occasionally. We just kept talking and talking :)

We were actually together for almost 7 years before we got married, but we are currently working our second job together.

I had just got back from volunteering (teaching English to Ethiopians) in Israel. I moved home to live with my mom temporarily. I was jobless, no money, and with a bachelors in Psychology.

I applied across the boards of Craigslist. No one really replied. I figured, I taught myself programming when I was younger, why not try for a programming job? A hit! I went in for my interview and I got hired to fix autobody collision software in Visual Basic 6.0. I did not have a car at the time, so I had asked the secretary if I could use her phone to call my brother.

Little did I know.. that woman fell in love with me as soon as I asked that question. Days later, getting to know everything, I would come see her because I thought she was nice and she had a laugh that always got to me. Loved that laugh. Once, I touched her hand, as I did when I was flirting, asking, "my hands are cold, can you warm them up?" She put them in her lap and said, "Delighted to warm your hands up." I really didn't even intend for anything more other than flirting, because you know, staring at a computer screen for 8 hours a day is not the most exciting thing in the world.. so flirting with a girl for a few minutes seemed like a fun alternative and a break from coding.

Anyways time went on... 3 months and a small raise, during all this time, she would come over and see how I was, ask me questions like what I was doing after work, and my thick head never even picked up the hints. Of course, she was a bit older than me, smoked, had kids, tattoos, and was not really on my radar or what I would have considered my type.

So my birthday comes.. she asks me, "What are you doing tonight?" I said to her, "Going to hang out with all the friends I don't have.. would you like to come?" She said she would love to. So sure enough, I went to the bar, none of my friends showed up (because I didn't have any), but she was there. I bought her a drink, she bought me a drink. We ended up having things in common. She admitted to me that she has had a crush on me ever since I walked in that first day and asked if I could use her phone. We kissed and the rest is history.

She later admitted two things to me: Had I not put my hand on hers "to warm up", she had taken those as hints that I was into her, though for me, I was just flirting. And the kiss on our first date... solidified her feelings for me.

And other than a small breakup for about 3 months, we got back together and have been together ever since, going on 7 years and to date - married on November 11, 2017 -- today is November 30, 2017.

As for her smoking.. while I told her to not quit for me, I explained to her that if she continued smoking, that it probably wasn't going to work out between us because it wasn't something I wanted to live with, so she ended up quitting smoking. Yeah.. some may call me an asshole for that, because I wasn't "letting her be herself", but she didn't have to quit, either, and we would have just gone our separate ways.

As for what happened about getting our second job together -- long story short -- first job: boss was harassing her, and putting me down. He had absolutely no knowledge we were dating. I applied to help her get another job and I applied for myself.. and we both got two separate jobs. I really wanted her job and she really wanted mine. Her job was looking for two people to hire (her being one). She mentioned to her new boss who I was and my skillset... after several weeks of searching, they couldn't find anyone willing to work those hours or with the skillset I had acquired from my former job, so they hired me, and I worked two jobs (16 hour days -- 8 AM to 2 AM) for almost 2 years, before the job I had originally gotten failed and laid me off.... so we've been working together pretty much nonstop since we met.

I mean, if you asked me a ...

On one "pre graduation party" there was a list of other students who signed up for the party, as well as their phone number.

I filtered it down to girls who come from my state, doing an engineering degree, who were the cheapest to SMS.

I planned to send multiple "Happy Holidays!" SMSes to those girls. But the Telco lines locked up because apparently everyone else sends SMSes during the eve of a holiday too.

So I only got one SMS out. It was to a girl whose name started with A, in the civil engineering faculty (which was course A).

I like the tough girls. She was practically an orphan, never backs down on her opinion, a sweet girl who could handle all the cursing and swearing of a 95% male construction site.

Our moms worked together and they worked hard to hook us up. I resisted for a couple years. Mom's persistence won. Now married over 10 years with 3 kids.

OkCupid.com + almost CyberStalking her via my “favorites” list. She initially told me she wasn’t available for dating. I liked her profile enough that I favorited it, and checked her profile every 2-3 days each time I sat down to email more women to get dates. When her profile changed, I messaged her asking if she was available now.

I got a 3 hour IM chat out of that. Which led to a date. Which led to more dates. Which led to me seeing a For Rent sign across the street from her place, and me fleeing the house I had occupied with my ex. Which led to a lot of impromptu interaction. Making dinner together and sharing plans helped us see what living together could be like. Which led to asking her to go to The Star Trek Experience in Vegas. Which led to the conception of our daughter. When our daughter was 3, I felt our relationship would stand the test of time, and asked her to marry me.

She said I was the only guy to contact her twice.

The ways I knew: she is brilliant, funny, agrees with me just enough to make things smooth, disagrees with me just enough to make things challenging and interesting (and inducing growth for both of us), ahem, great sex. But now after 9 years, it’s just every few days to a week, something happens between us that affirms our match is a great one, and we are lucky to have found each other.

Edit: prior to meeting her, the dozens of women I dated helped me see what I wanted, what I didn’t want, what I could put up with. And most importantly, what I was bringing to the table.