When (And How) Donald Met Lisa

For those of you out there who are following along, I mentioned at the end of my last WftM! post that the best part of working at B&B was that I met a wonderful girl. But before I get to the story of her, I must fill you in on the background of how I met her.

Back when AOL was king of the internet world is when I really started to utilize the World Wide Web. I would use it to read sports stories and check up on sports scores. I would use email to receive and forward jokes. But most of all I used it to chat to people. It was a great way to meet other people, and learn what they were interested in. And when I say “other people” I mostly mean girls. OK, I only mean girls. I had enough guy friends, I didn’t have to cruise the net to find more of them

For those of you who were internet savvy back then, if you wanted to meet girls online, you only had one real option, and it was the AOL chat rooms. AOL had a chat room set up for everything. You want to connect with others who have an Elmer Fudd fetish? There would be a chat room for that. Or maybe chatting with others who were interested in the National Horseshoe Throwers Tour was your thing. Pretty much whatever you wanted to chat about you could. My two favorite chat rooms were the sports chat rooms, and the Mormon chat room.

Another thing you could do on AOL is do a member search. You could search by city, and see what kind of profiles you would come up with. You could almost say that it was an early version of Myspace or Facebook.

So there I would be, in a chat room, checking the profiles of the girls that I would be chatting to, to see if I saw anyone interesting. Believe it or not, I had fairly good luck finding girls this way. Or you could say bad luck. While there were a handful of girls that I ended up meeting in person, and had a good time hanging out with them, there were two in particular that ended in disaster.

I must admit that they were both my fault for not checking into them a little further before I became interested. The first girl was Heather. I met her in a chat room, and checking out her profile, she seemed like a nice down to earth person. The only problem that I saw was that she didn’t have a picture on her profile.

Now, I want to make it clear right now. Looks might not be everything, but they are something. You could have everything in common with somebody, but if you aren’t attracted to them, then it just isn’t going to work. There has to be some level of attraction. You can agree with me or not, that is your right. But you would be wrong.

OK, back to Heather. At first Heather seemed like a good one. She claimed that she was an athlete, which at the time I was convinced that the only kind of girl that I could see myself with was one that could play basketball. We had the same interest in music and food. We even watched the same TV shows. The only downside was that Heather lived in Bellingham, and I was in the Tri-Cities. Oh, and she didn’t have a car, so if I wanted to meet her in person, I would have to drive up there.

And drive up there I almost did. I have my Mom to thank for talking some sense into me. The plan was that I would drive up to see her for the weekend, and see how we hit it off. My Mother decided to play the concerned parent part, and let me know what she thought about it. First off, she told me that I haven’t even seen a picture of this girl yet. Also the girl didn’t sound very stable. And the more I thought about it, she was right on both counts.

Heather from very early on wanted to refer to us as Ross and Rachel from the TV show Friends. She would even send me emails that said to Ross from Rachel. I did find this very strange, and was apprehensive about going along with it. And yes, I really had no clue what this girl looked like. So even though I felt a little bit bad at first about demanding a picture, I did it anyways. Heather explained that she didn’t have a scanner, so she would go to the Library to scan one to email me. A couple weeks passed, and when I received the picture, I instantly understood what my Mom was trying to explain to me.

Now I wouldn’t say that Heather was an ugly girl. But I was in no way attracted to her. I didn’t want to upset her right away, so I waited a couple days to email her and let her know I wasn’t going to be coming up. When I did, she was none too happy about it. In fact, she told me that I had broken her heart, and that Ross wasn’t supposed to do that. I think this girl had totally forgotten that my real name was Donald, and not Ross. And after two weeks or so of emails from her saying how I ruined her life, she started to leave me alone.

After that whole episode I decided to be a little choosier about who I met online. From that point on a picture was required before I went any further. But my friends, even a picture is not enough sometimes. And Melissa is living proof of this.

I met Melissa in the Mormon chat room one day. Kind of like Heather, looking at her profile and chatting to her she seemed like a great person. The difference separating the two was that this girl had a picture. I soon started chatting with her every day. Not just on the internet, but on the phone too. She lived all the way in Utah, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I slowly started to fall in love with a girl that I had never met face to face. Her birthday came, and I sent her flowers. For my birthday she sent me cologne and a CD. It was starting to move pretty fast.

I was coming up on my first year of employment at B&B, which meant that I was going to get my first ever week of paid vacation. I decided that I was going to use it to drive to Utah and meet the girl that I was going to possibly marry. Once again, my good ol’ Mom didn’t think that it was a good idea. But this time I was not going to let her talk me out of meeting my dream girl. So I hopped in my Ford Probe, and started the trek to Utah. I had never up to that point in my life been that far away from home. Driving to Seattle was the furthest I had ever been. I loved the drive there. From the feeling of being out on the open road, to the feeling of excitement that was brewing inside me, I couldn’t have asked for a better time. Well, right up to the point of me pulling into the gas station parking lot where we had decided to meet.

I got there first, and gave Mel a call on my cell to let her know I was here. She told me that she would be there in 5 minutes. While I was waiting, I had emotions sweep over the top of me. It was going to be a crowning point in my life. It is hard to explain all the things running through my head. Then all of a sudden, her red 1998 Chevy Cavalier pulled into the parking lot. My heart was pounding with excitement. Her car came to a halt, and the door opened. Mel stepped out of the car. And at that exact moment, I went from the sweet feeling euphoria of being in love, to the feeling someone must get when they see their family car hit by a semi, and it topples over a cliff with everyone inside it but them.

Remember what I said about needing to be attracted to someone? There wasn’t any thought running through my head that resembled attraction. The reason is that this girl misrepresented herself grossly. She was a big girl…big with a capital “B”. I had made a huge mistake. Looking back on it the signs were all there. The picture I had seen of her was from the shoulders up. When Mel had mailed me some additional pictures, they had all been scrapbooked to only show her from the shoulders up. There was even the time when I found a shirt in a store that she wanted, and when I had asked her what shirt size she was so I could buy it for her, she responded that she didn’t know what size of shirt she wore. She wouldn’t even give me a ballpark measurement to go by.

Even though I had been lied too, I decided to give this thing a chance anyways. But after two days, I knew in my heart that I could not honestly go along with it. It was the night of her Brother’s wedding reception when I decided enough was enough, and I was going to go home. I told crop face (which in Sorenson Family history she is now known) that I wasn’t feeling well, and that I was going to go back to her parent’s house to lie down. As soon as I got in the front door, I called up my Mom in tears. I told her how it all went down, and that I just couldn’t do it. She told me that the best thing for me to do was to come home right away. After hanging up with her, I started to feel better, and was preparing to tell crop face that I was leaving.

A few minutes after I hung up the phone, crop face showed up at the house. She knew something was wrong, but she wasn’t ready for what I was going to tell her. I laid it all out on the line, and told her that I was going to head out that night, and that I was sorry that it had gone this far. This is when she broke out crying. She gave me the “I prayed about you” line and that “She knew I was the one” line. Then she begged that I stay for the rest of the week. This kind of caught me off guard. I thought for sure she would want me out right then and there. I told her that I would stay.

For the next four days I was miserable. Crop face was trying her hardest to get me to change my mind. But I knew deep down that this wasn’t right, and that it never would be. When the time came to head home, she gave one last push to make me her man. No amount of sway was going to change my mind though. When I made it back home, she emailed me once or twice more before we cut off all contact. The funny thing about her is that I came across her Myspace page about six months ago, and she is still cropping all of her pictures. Some things never change.

When I got home I was pretty depressed about the whole situation. I went from a date with destiny to being back in the single rider line again. I was ready to settle down with a nice girl. I just didn’t feel like trying to meet her anymore. I had even planned on taking a break away from the internet so I could clear my head. But of course I didn’t. Good thing I didn’t too, I would have missed out on meeting the girl I would end up marrying.

It was June of 1999. One night I was back in the Mormon chat room, to see if there was anyone in there that I had talked to before. There wasn’t anyone that I happen to recognize. There was someone with the screen name “Aldrin002” though. This person kept on wanting to talk about baseball. Well, mainly about the Yankees. She had a thing for the Yankees. Yankees this, Yankees that. I did a quick profile check to see their info. It was a girl. Hmmm…I decided to join in with her baseball talk. Soon the other people in the room started to get angry. One person typed, “This is not baseball chat, this is MORMON CHAT!!!” I replied with, “OK, why don’t you strike up a dialogue about the Book of Mormon then buddy?” Before I knew it, everyone in the room had put me and Aldrin002 on ignore. Aldrin002 and I chatted a while longer, and when it was time to go, I said I was going to send her an email. She was OK with that. I logged out of the chat, and wrote an “All about me” email.

Every day I would check my email to see if she had responded yet. Almost a week later, I got my response. I then emailed her back, and received another email in return. Before I knew it, we were emailing back and forth and chatting for hours each day. Even though I had learned my lesson about meeting girls online, I had a feeling that it was going to be different this time. I got her phone number and started talking to her on the phone. We talked so much that she actually maxed out a credit card paying for long distance calls. We would talk until the wee hours of the morning. I would sing to her on the phone. I could not get this girl out of my head.

I found out her name was Lisa, and that she was from Southern California, and was going to BYU. She was in the music program, where she played the violin. And while she was not an athlete, she did enjoy sports. I figured that was good enough. In one of our earlier phone conversations, I asked her to mail me some pictures. And they had to be full body shot pictures. I told her that I had just gone through a bad experience with another girl, and I wanted to make sure I knew exactly what she looked like, from head to toe. Not having a problem with this, Lisa mailed me some pictures.

Receiving that envelope in the mail was one of the best moments in my life. I opened it up, and saw the most stunning girl that I had ever laid eyes on staring back at me. I had to meet this girl in person. She was the one. No doubt about it.

With a stroke of luck, we were able to meet sooner rather than later. Lisa had a classmate who just happened to be going home for a few days that summer. She told Lisa that she lived in a town called Yakima, and that Kennewick was on the way there. Lisa hitched a ride with her, and made the trip here. I remember looking out the window for her car to drive down my street. Then, after hours of waiting, a car pulled up. I ran outside to meet her, and kissed her just like we had planned out on the phone. We went into the house and I introduced her to everyone.

My mother knew right off the bat that I had met “the one.” No doubts were coming from her this time. That week in August was absolutely amazing. I was with Lisa every waking minute of the day. When we would go out, I felt like I was the luckiest man in the whole world. Higher than cloud 9…more like cloud 99. She was supposed to get picked up on Thursday, but it was decided that I would drive her back to school so she could stay a couple extra days. When Saturday rolled around, we hopped into my car with my good friend Brad Butherus to drive her back to Utah. I remember dropping her back off at school, and feeling like a part of me was being ripped away. Lisa felt the same way too.

But we were not apart for very long. While talking on the phone the next week, Lisa had an idea. She wanted to move up here to be closer to me. I was more than happy to oblige her. So the very next weekend, I headed back to Utah to pick up this wonderful woman. Like I said earlier, the car that I had at the time was a Ford Probe. Not exactly the kind of car you would think to use to load up all of someone’s’ belongings into. But that is what we did, and somehow, everything fit.

Looking back on it, I cannot believe that Lisa did what she did. She is not the kind of person to make irrational decisions like that. I am willing to bet that it is the only time in her life that she has ever done something like that. Needless to say, her mom was not a happy camper about it. Lisa had always done exactly was her mother wanted, and exactly what was expected from her. She had worked so hard since the time she was 6 years old to learn how to play the violin. Her mom found a world class violinist to teach her, and every week would drive her an hour south down to San Diego for lessons. And when her teacher moved to Utah, she would fly Lisa up there for instruction. And according to Lisa, getting into the BYU music program isn’t a walk in the park. She gave up so much just to be by me. And I couldn’t be more grateful towards her for that. Luckily, around Christmas time things started to get patched up with her mom. Good thing too, since I had just asked her to marry me.

Well, that about wraps it up. We were married at the Moore Mansion in Pasco, WA on August 19, 2000, and were sealed a year later in the Seattle Temple on August 24. She has given me three stunningly beautiful daughters, a taste for classical music, (something that I never would have thought possible) and a house that could pass the white glove test any time or day of the week. And she made me happier than I ever thought possible.

And now you know the rest of the story.