Our love story - how we met through a dating agency
Joining a dating agency changed our lives. Did you also find love via a dating service?
Meeting your life-partner is not always an easy affair if you excuse the pun. If your job means you work long hours, you aren't the sort of person who likes picking up or being picked up in pubs and clubs and the work you do is traditionally gender dominated then you may never meet the right person. This is the situation that both myself and my wife found ourselves in before we met.To explain further, my work was in the Construction Industry - a business with few women in (at least in my day there weren't many) and those that were tended to be clerks and receptionists. I was looking for a career-minded lady and not one who was just doing whatever job came along until she got married. My wife's work, on the other hand involved working with children (apart from being tri-lingual, she is also a qualified Montessori teacher). She only ever tended to meet mothers and the odd father.
I had had a few bad experiences with women largely because I had felt sorry for their predicament and got involved with someone who really wasn't for me. I remember telling one girl I was leaving her and she just said 'OK' as nonchalantly as if I had just offered her a cup of tea and a digestive. I hadn't realised how miserable I was until I'd said it and left. I walked on air that afternoon and treated myself to a gold chain which I wear to this day!
My wife had, a few months earlier, broken up with her fiancé because he wanted a relationship by committee. If she asked him if he loved her, he would just about need to consult with his friends to check! There was also a girlfriend-sharing cult operating and my wife did not fancy the idea of having an affair with her fiancé's best friend so that they could discuss her afterwards.
I joined a national dating agency thinking that it would give me the biggest selection of possible dates. I was careful to screen out smokers, clubbers, heavy drinkers, separated girls, girls that were too young or too old and so forth. For some reason the computer chose to ignore my conditions and sent me details of anyone it felt like. I ploughed through them and, in the end and after having visited the dating agency's office on two occasions, realised that I had got through everyone they had on their books in my area. There were some very strange ladies and you can read about one of them here - my weirdest date.
My wife, on the other hand had joined a small dating agency, met a few men of whom she half-liked one (and had dated a few times before it fizzled out) but then got fed up and resigned.
After the fiasco of the weirdest date, I looked around and decided to join a very different sort of dating agency - a small, more personal, one. My wife, at the same time, decided to 'give it another go' and reactivated her membership of the same agency that I had just joined. She described the man she had half-liked to the proprietor and told him she wanted to meet other men like him.
As soon as I'd paid my dating agency membership fee, I was given three names and numbers and told more would be supplied to me after I'd got through them. I was advised that I had been 'personally matched' to these girls and they had not just been assigned to me by a computer.
The first girl I called was just in the process of preparing for her wedding. I didn't really see much future there so I hung up quickly. The second had gone away and no-one on that phone number knew where she had gone let alone a number to give me (this was before mobile phones) and the third, well, the third was my wife. We spoke for ages and then arranged to meet up (foolishly at her house - never do that!).
We've now been married for twenty years (well, it will be next month).
Now send us your love stories about how you met - use feedback. At the Dating Free Site we love to hear a good love story.