Dustin and I met through the popular social networking website MySpace. Even though it has been a world wide phenomenon for years, I was slow at jumping on the bandwagon. It just never held much appeal for me. I guess I had the preconceived notion that it was something designed to occupy the time of giggly junior high girls and decided that it was not for me. Nevertheless, I was lonely and decided to give it a whirl (I guess I am just a giggly junior high girl at heart).

Earlier that year, I had placed a personal ad on Yahoo. I found it to be crawling with weirdoes and jerks. The Yahoo experience soured me on the whole prospect of meeting people online but at the behest of my cousin, I set up a MySpace account and started to design my page. Still, it was months before I did anything with it. When I did finally finish it, I spent some time browsing, looking at the profiles of local people. I managed to reconnect with a few old acquaintances from high school but I did not make a conscious effort to search for guys.

Nevertheless, one evening I was exploring MySpace and I came across the profile of a cute guy named Dustin. He was a disc jockey from Johnstown. I thought that was cool, since I love music. I thought it was funny that he loved the Golden Girls enough to include a photo of the cast on his page. This to me was an endearing factor since I LOVE the Golden Girls, too, and have seen every episode so many times I can literally quote them.

Something else that intrigued me was the quote line beside his picture. Written in German, it said "Es regnet es Schwul e Männer, die wirklich sich irgendwo in der Welt interessieren." I’m not sure I ever told him this but I looked it up back then and laughed when I discovered that roughly translated it means, “It rains gay men that are interested really somewhere in the world”.

I remember when checking out Dustin’s pictures on his MySpace thinking to myself, "He looks like a handsome prince from some Disney movie”. I know that sounds sappy but for some untold reason that’s the first thought that popped into my head when I saw that smile and those beautiful eyes. In retrospect, I am sure the parrot on his hand in his default picture at the time probably had a little something to do with me drawing a comparison to him with some animated character too - a shot of him with his parrot Jazzy - (I would later find out upon meeting him in person what a truly animated character he really is).

I found myself sending him a message. I wanted to get to know this Dustin person. I wasn’t sure if he would even give me the time of day since he had something like 197 friends, but I decided to take a chance. To my surprise and excitement, he responded.

We exchanged AOL Instant Message screen names and for the next three or four days we spent hours talking.

We decided that we should meet in person, but what should we do? What should our first date be? Do I dare even call it a date?

The night before we met for the first time, we chatted online trying to decide where we should go. We decided to go hiking.

And the rest is history....