April 15, 2001
Sometimes the unbelievable does happen !

Before this impossible event occurred I had been married for almost 20 years. I had spent much time and effort trying to make that marriage work, but for most of it there was not much more then friendship. Always that something more was missing. But it seems that there is always a purpose in life with whatever happens. That purpose created a chain of events that lead me to being where I was, at the right time and the right place. If I had not been were I was at that instant in time what followed would not, could not have ever occurred. These events lead me to a job in Florida and my eventual introduction to the Internet.

The Job I had when I moved to Florida ended up relocating to Texas and I remained in Florida, but to do so I had to take a job out of my normal field. At this job I became injured and was unable to work for 3 and a half years. It was during this new, “free” time that I discovered the Internet. But my inability to work caused many problems including financial ones and even lead to bankruptcy. All of this caused enough strain on that marriage; it did not survive, we had decided to divorce.

I eventually was able to begin working again, but those three and a half years had shown me just how empty my life really had been for those 20 years. But now here I was 47 years old starting out all over again, I had no job, no car, I still needed to find some place to live, and I had no money. Eventually there was a small settlement and I had some money to live on until I could find a new job.

I did find a new job, but I was being paid less then half of what I had been making before being injured. But I couldn’t complain, after a couple of surgical procedures at least I was now able to work, and I had only a couple more to go. Best of all I was making new friends again.
Living and enjoying life again. But still I saw how empty my life had been and was still.

It was then that I decided to try something and see what would happen. Two months after filing for divorce I placed an ad in one of those on line personal ads. This was something I had never done before, had not even thought of before, and I was very hesitant to do so. But I thought “what the heck, it couldn’t hurt”.
With in a day or two of placing the ad I received 6 answers. But amazingly the very first reply I received was the woman I fell in love with instantly, just from that letter alone. There was so much we had in common. We wrote letters by email every day or more often and then with in a week or two we started talking on the phone. We both very quickly knew we had to meet in person, that there was something very special going on between us. Something out of our control and completely amazing.
It was as if fate had lead us to this moment in time, this moment of finding each other. It was as if it was our destiny to find each other. Everything in my life was just something to bring me to this one place and this one moment in time.
And just as amazing was that this beautiful woman didn’t care about anything except me, it didn’t matter about my job or my having been injured or my having been married for 20 years or the bankruptcy or even that the divorce wasn’t even final yet. Not even the fact we lived about 1,500 miles apart in different countries. All that mattered was we both fell instantly in love with each other.

It was about a month after that first letter that we meet in person, but even before that I knew this was the person that everything in my life had been leading me to, I knew even before meeting we would be married very soon. We meet and spent a week together traveling and sight seeing. As we saw in our letters to each other we found that we had so very much in common. In the letters before even meeting we had even joked about being clones, now in person we found we even did things alike, we found we would even sit in the same way but like a mirror image.

And the whole time together love grew even greater and stronger between us. We had even been asked if we were newly wed. I had thought “not yet, but soon”.

After that trip together we each returned to our own homes, but we both wanted to be together and about two weeks later we meet again. During this time apart we had decided we would get married, and not even two months had gone by since the first letters.

Our second meeting was not very long after the first one. By this time we both knew we would be getting married. The next time we would meet would be about 2 weeks later, and we spent Christmas and New Years together, by now we were making wedding plans and looking at rings, and deciding on where we would get married and the kind of ceremony we would have. We had now set a date for our getting married, our marriage would occur at the end of January.
And amazingly we had set a date to get married and were making arrangement for the wedding, and I had not even received my divorce yet. But we both felt the divorce would be completed before that time.

The beginning of January my divorce hearing was held shortly after New Years day and we went together, and I received my divorce.

Three months after receiving that first letter this amazing and incredible woman and I was married. The ceremony was held in New Mexico, south east from Santa Fe in Bandelier National monument, 1600 mile away from where I live.

Why New Mexico, and not where I live? Because it was a very special ceremony held in a very special place. The ceremony was held on a plateau above the ancient Anatasi cliff houses, a very magical place, and a place of great beauty. The ceremony was called a non-traditional ceremony because it was more like the ceremonies that the ancient Native American performed then it was like the ceremonies held in churches.

Even the day of the ceremony was “magical”. It had been snowing the day before and that night, but the morning and afternoon was snow free and clear skies, soon after the ceremony the sky started to become over cast and gray and not much after it began to snow again. The weather report had said it was suppose to snow all that night before, all that day and all that night.
We had to park on the roadside in some parking spaces next to the road and hike into the Tsankawi ancient ruins. After walking through snow covered paths we had to climb a log ladder to get up onto the plateau, there the ceremony was held under clear blue skies with the song of a flute playing in the background.

Now it is Easter, and this is the longest we have been apart since that first letter. The INS paper work has been completed and the visa issued, and now we wait for a few more miracles to occur so we can be together forever.

John Dietrich, Florida