Achievement Unlocked: Meeting the love of my life on Xbox Live

Early in 2010 I was living the normal teenage boy life: play Xbox every day, from the minute I got home from school until 9PM that night; weekends consisted of me and my friends staying up until 7 or 8 AM playing Call of Duty: World at War, Gears of War 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Halo 3. I was a nerd, a social shut-in, some might say I was a freak; I had more friends on my Xbox then I did at my school, and those friends that I did have I normally talked to more on Xbox Live than I did in real life.

I can’t recall the exact date I got the life changing notification, but I do remember distinctly what I was doing. Jumping over a downed piece of building in Borderlands as Mordecai. My gamertag at the time was Billy Mayes v2 (yes, spelled incorrectly), something it had been since before he’d died – but that’s a story for another day. Bleep Bloop! “soupremacy wants to be your friend.” I was in a party with my friend Troy at the time “Soupremacy wants to be your friend. Troy, do you know anyone named Soupremacy?” “Nope, not my friend” he replied. I searched through the unknown persons friends list, seeing if we had any mutual friends, but there were none. “I think it might be a girl Troy.” I invited her into the party “Just be quiet I’ll see who she is” I told him.

“Hi… is it OK if I be your friend?” she said in a nervous, squeaky voice “Yeah, that’s fine” I said back, more sternly then I’d like to remember “Oh… uhh… Ok, see you around” “See ya”, and like that she was gone. I immediately started messaging her to see who she really was. We exchanged ages and information, she told me her name was Karley and I told her mine was Austin. I waited a few minutes, then sent out a sly message “Message to all Friends: Working on my next Halo 3 montage, if you’re interested in submitting clips, reply to this message or text me” and then my cell phone number. It was all a ploy: there was no message to all friends, she was the only one to receive that message, and the only one that ever would. (There really was montage though, only I’d finished working on it awhile before, and I had no intention of picking it up again, but that’s another story for another time.)

A few days later my phone lit up. It was Karley. She told me she didn’t have any footage to submit, but she thought we could talk.

Before we go any further though, you’d probably like to know how exactly Karley got to finding me and why she added me in the first place. This is where it gets really weird. The amount of coincidence here is what really leads me to believe fate brought us together. A few weeks prior the this, I had signed up for Raptr, a video game tracking service that tracks how long you play certain games and tweets when you’re online. Karley had searched “Xbox” on Twitter at the exact same time as my daily Raptr update had posted, saying, leading the first post she saw to be “Billy Mayes v2 played… today and earned… achievements on Xbox Live”. She, thinking that was the REAL BILLY MAYS HERE, went ahead and added me.

From then on we were inseparable. Talking every moment of every day, morning to night. She was in every Xbox Live party I was and everyone I knew had met her. We played Gears of War together, Skyped every weekend, our phone calls would end when the birds began to chip, and text each other literally every minute of the day.

I finally asked her out on March of that year. She said yes, obviously, and it’s been over three  (four next month) years since we started dating. Since that day, she’s been to Delaware to see me five times now, totaling over three months. While over those three years many people have told us that “long distance relationships don’t work” and that “you can’t meet someone online and expect it to work”, we believe we’re living proof that it can, will, and has worked out.

It’s crazy what can change your life. I wouldn’t be where I am or who I am today had I not decided to link my Twitter and Raptr together, and I can’t imagine it any other way.