A serendipitous love story that has been tough for some to accept.
One doesn’t typically hear about love stories launched through auctions on eBay. After all, it’s not a dating site, bidders don’t exchange messages with one another, and no one ever emails the winner of something they hoped they’d score to applaud the victor on being the happy new owner. No one, that is, except for the warm-hearted person who ended up being my soul mate.
It began innocently enough. I’d slipped into the computer lab at college on that late October day in 1999, snaked the rare European compilation CD I desired at the last second, then immediately felt a bit guilty for doing so. One, I’d spent $41.00 plus shipping for it; and two, I’d taken it from someone who’d wanted it too. Imagine my surprise when I arrived home that day to discover an email from said person with a note of congratulations!
Over the next couple months—with me in awe of her kind-hearted nature and us both being major Sarah Brightman fans—this person named Dana and I started emailing each other regularly and fostered a friendship. We shared a few facts about ourselves and felt fairly certain neither was a creepy stalker guy posing as a friendly female. She was 37; I was 30. She lived in Indiana; I lived in Southern California. We were both born on the 18th (how cool!) of different months. That kind of stuff. Then Instant Messenger became a mode of communication and we started doing that, which we followed by mailing each other photos so we could put a face to all the messages we were exchanging.
Increasingly, I found myself rushing home to see if I had any messages from Dana.
I felt a comfort and connection with her I couldn’t readily explain but that resonated on a deep level—and from what I could tell, she felt the same.
That New Year’s Eve was the wondrous dawning of the millennium in more ways than one. Just eight minutes before the ball dropped, Dana’s familiar chime made my heart leap; she had rushed home from a party to "make" my midnight, and we ended up spending the next four hours chatting on Instant Messenger.
It was during that marathon conversation that Dana tentatively disclosed to me that she’d had girlfriends, but that her family’s religious beliefs had shrouded her in fear of her soul’s destiny if she continued loving women. Having completely opposite spiritual beliefs, this broke my heart. It also presented a major dilemma: by the time I awoke that next morning, I felt an overwhelming sense that I was in love.
Until then, I’d never dated a woman. I’d had innocent "boyfriends" all through elementary and junior high, then my first love during my senior year of high school—a beautiful Greek boy with whom I shared both adoration and chemistry. After we broke up, no one really compared, and I’d mostly stayed single, except for one failed engagement.
Now, with unparalleled feelings of soul connection, I knew I’d fallen in love—with someone I’d never met in person, and a woman at that.
Dana and I couldn’t have been more different in a multitude of ways; on the surface, us being a couple seemed nearly impossible, and the obstacles on her end were immense. I contemplated not telling her how I felt, hesitant to complicate her life even further. But I told her nonetheless, and she confessed she’d fallen in love with me too.
Yes, we had several hurdles to jump to be together, but after finally meeting in May of 2000 and discovering that our soul connection was indeed not merely a cyber illusion, Dana made the enormous physical and spiritual leap to live with me in California. We’ve been together ever since.
While my supremely open family embraced Dana, her family could never bring themselves to do the same. For a long time, it unnerved me that my soul mate couldn’t enjoy the love and acceptance I did; I marveled at how anyone could look at the rare and mystical circumstances of how Dana and I met and not find anything but serendipity and divinity in it. Had I been a man, her family would have likely relished our uncommonly magical love story. Who wouldn’t? But because I was a woman, they saw only a pairing that was depraved and ungodly, and sadly, refused to ever meet me.
While this saddened me, Dana and I had been brought together in a way that felt divine, and the fact that we were both women did not even faze us. We both saw love as a soul connection that reached beyond bodies or gender, and though that understanding certainly served to anchor us as a couple, it couldn’t fully counterbalance the undeniable hurt Dana experienced from her family’s rejection.
Even in this age where there is increasing acceptance of individual choices, there is still far too much labeling of love. Our heartfelt wish for the world is that labels surrounding gender and relationships will be replaced by a recognition that love begins and ends with the soul—and that a pure soul connection supersedes gender every time.
Stacey Aaronson is the founder of The Book Doctor Is In, where she takes writers by the hand as a ghostwriter, editor, book and website designer, and publishing partner to bring books of excellence to life. She is also author of the memoir "Raising, and Losing, My Remarkable Teenage Mother". Stacey lives on Whidbey Island, WA, with her soul mate of twenty-one years, Dana, and their rescued Maine Coon kitty. Visit Stacey at www.thebookdoctorisin.com and www.staceyaaronson.com.
