I Met My Wife In The World of Warcraft!

Real people, in video games?!

No way! Ah-but it’s true! At least for now, the only entity you’ll see in online video games playing alongside you *and* holding meaningful conversations with you for years on end will be other humans. It is important to realize that. Even so, many serious or “hardcore” gamers require vocal communication with you inside the game, because their hands are busy with the controls and it is simply faster to speak. That can be an amusing thing indeed: here you have a towering ally in plate armor with massive weapons, only to realize it’s a crazy grandmother gleefully ruining your high scores with ease.

The World of Warcraft was released in 2004, one of the first few entries into the world of MMOs. I’d played a few other MMOs before that one, but from the moment the game opened with its exceptional cinematic quality, you knew this was going to be something better. For its time, it led several innovations and standards in the game industry. Of course, they didn’t get everything right, but hey-who does?

It was with wide eyes, easily ignored obligations, limited social life, and few other interests in life that I began my addiction to the game. Within a couple of days, I’d started to consistently run into a familiar group of friends over multiple regions. We’d helped each other out a number of times and those initial meet & greets were good all around. As it goes with gamer culture, a friend invitation was sent to extend a more permanent relation with the group. I had found some online friends to play with.

Wasn’t long before assets were shared among the group to work towards funding a “guild” so we could all unite under a single banner. Beyond being an online “friend” with someone in a game, the coveted guild invitation is a huge opportunity to explore long-term association with friends. Back then, the voice services readily available were Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. I was hesitant to join these at first, being a reclusive anti-social myself: was this ‘real world’ intrusion worth it? Yes. Yes it was, and for many other reasons, I’d suggest this be done as often as possible!

For the next 11–12 years, I played this game with these friends. Some of her extended family joined the game for a short time, too. Made new friends over the years! Memories were made, stories were told, and great amounts of fun were had! Some members left the group, others joined, and one or two even died over the years. Eventually, due to my own life choices and circumstances, I’d chosen to move out of the state I was in to do the whole ‘life adventure’ thing. Of the several possible places I could move to, one of those was the town where my guild leader lived. She and I had gotten to know each other as great friends over the last decade, and it seemed like a fair possibility that something could work out! I was hopeful!

We talked about renting a house together in her town. Rent was easy enough to cover, we both had jobs, and it sounded like it would be a great adventure! Getting to know someone for so long, even over great distances, felt like it was too good to be true! How could I have been so lucky to have randomly found someone I could see myself growing with?

Well, it was too good to be true. Life lessons often come when you least expect and certainly when you hope things are going in a different direction. The life lesson I learned at this point was that you never really know someone until you get up close and personal with them. Even with spending dozens of hours a week for a decade in a game, even with ‘stressful’ situations, there is a great deal lacking from the whole face-to-face experience. The person I had “known” for over a decade of my life was completely different than the person I had moved in with as a friend.

I’d started to look elsewhere in that tiny little town for companionship. Spending several frustrating months of the first year of that move to a new town, something really amazing did happen. In a completely unexpected and unlikely situation, another friend I had made in that new town had a sudden realization that she knew someone who might actually be a great fit for me. While passing by some cows next to the walking path, she called up this friend and got her to agree to meet over a Facebook video chat. We had a fun talk, and I bought her Borderlands 2-which brought us both quite a bit of fun.

The next morning, we met up at the walking path and had a fun stroll. We hit it off, but it was at breakfast at a local small diner where it happened. The friend who introduced us was sitting on one side of the table, and this new woman was sitting next to me. The friend told us to look at each other and make a funny face while she took a picture. That was it; that was the “zing” moment. That was the moment that solidified our future.

Over the next couple of months, I slowly started moving things over to her place. Eventually, when she suggested I move my computer to her place because I “spent more time there anyway”, that was the next stage. We chose to make that move more permanent and officially move in together.

My old ‘friend’ who I ‘knew’ from a decade of online games wasn’t happy that her meal ticket was leaving, but the most amusing part of that was who my girlfriend was. I had no idea about their relationship until well into our own courtship, but I had started dating her second cousin. We laughed about that quite a bit.

In just that span of one year of moving to a new town to seek adventure with a ‘friend’ I’d ‘known’ for over a decade, I ended up dating her second cousin and then taking that ‘friend’ to small claims court. I won most of my money back from the habitually lying manipulator who took advantage of my naïve goodwill. After having distributed a binder full of supportive evidence, records, and screenshots of social media posts, the judge complimented me on how prepared I was. Another life lesson: if you are going to take drastic legal action, be prepared. Opinion, hearsay, and especially lying to a judge are very fast ways of destroying your case. Crazy, right?

At the time, my girlfriend and I realized we had actually played the World of Warcraft together, as she joined her extended family for a time. The amusing thing about that was that we had specifically remembered when we started talking to each other in the game, but had been continually interrupted by that ‘friend’ whenever it was going well. Back then, I sometimes wondered what would have changed if my girlfriend and I had more of a chance to talk and get to know each other instead.

But it all worked out! After that small claims court victory, we moved to yet another state to continue our adventure together, and to be closer to my family and my job (which I’d been working remotely with for years). Not too many years later, we got engaged and then married. We still play the World of Warcraft, on and off, all these years later. Every single time we start that game up and see that logo, there is that small amusing reminder of how we ended up together.

I met my wife in the World of Warcraft! It wasn’t exactly the adventure I’d expected, but it is still going strong now! We still spend most of our nights creating art, stories, or playing one of our many games together. From Age of Empires II to Starcraft, from Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 to World of Warcraft and Warfame, we tread through the stars together. I have no doubt we’ll be gamers till our last days!