The Very First Emails Alex and I Sent to Each Other (We Were Nervous!)

I want to see more people’s original emails and/or messages! These things are awesome and I love the after-commentary!

So sweet! Thanks for sharing both the OG emails and your current thoughts. Made me smile for sure!

I sent an appreciation email after reading a blogpost in 2006 :-). We met FIVE years later and eventually got married 8 years after that first email (baby is now ONE!). I’m glad I sent that email.

*Just echoing most everyone else to say this truly made me smile. Funny when you can think back to the beginning of a relationship and blush. Love that you still had these!

With most of my exes, there was a lot of emailing – funny, interesting, flirty, silly – but with my husband of 13 years, I don’t think we have ever sent each other a single email that is not purely functional and condensed to purely need-to-know information – along the lines of “can you laminate attached” or “holiday booking ref attached” or “remember ballet finishes 6.30 today.” If you cut and pasted them altogether they wouldn’t even make up an A4 piece of paper. I don’t know what that means!

I give you major props for writing in lowercase to a New York Times journalist! :) I’m so self-conscious – I remember in the early days, I’d read my emails to my now husband 5x over. I work in media relations and am SO impressed that you sort of “pitched” the date as an opportunity for coverage too – so freakin smart. Happy anniversary to you!

Happy anniversary!! From a reader who’s been here since you two were dating…11 years makes ME feel old! My own 7 year anniversary is next week and I shamelessly copied your bridal look four years after. I didn’t realize until now the dates were similar too, haha. Your wedding was so beautiful! I loved reading about it!

I haven’t posted here in forever, but I absolutely love this! thanks so much for sharing! This makes me so happy! I love that he says he felt like he won a billion dollars!

Recently, I was chatting to a guy on a dating app. Then he wrote that he’s only in town for the weekend, for a friend’s wedding — and would I like to join him for it? (Acknowledging that it’s an insane idea, but why not) I said yes, if it’s ok with the bride and groom. It turned out that the wedding was full, but we ended up going for drinks the night before it. Later that night he said he’d liked that I’d been up for going to the wedding for the fun of it.

just had to write and say what a great post. I was reluctant to read in case it felt like sticky beaking but the way you handled this is perfect. You can see the connection already in this exchange. Alex’s comment about feeling he’d won a billion dollars; I remember that exact emotion when you get a call or email from someone you are dead keen on. This is all the nice bits of dating without the heartbreak!

This is priceless! My husband recently found the scrap of paper on which I wrote my name and phone number when we met at the laundromat 19 years ago!

So for a month or two now, my partner and I have been “planning to get engaged,” and “knowing we will get engaged,” and “just starting to look at planning a wedding so we know what engagement will involve.”

Yesterday we had a milestone conversation in this whole process, and when I shared it with my therapist today, she was like, “ummmm, I mean, you KNOW you’re already engaged right? Like that was the engagement, that conversation yesterday.”

So I am of course over the moon and feeling all the nostalgic relationship FEELS and I definitely saved screenshots of some of our early texts and have totally looked back at them during this slow roll engagement, but I’m also planning to email the app we used and see if they can send me our first messages from the app. I think I was so nervous that I might jinx it when we first started dating that I just didn’t screenshot those messages before I deleted the app. Like oh look at me being all nonchalant about this amazing human and the thoughtful things he writes me. Nothing to see here, Universe, please don’t make this blow up in my face since I’m playing it so cool and all.

This totally made my day. I need to track down those first e-mails between me and my husband…gotta love the feigned nonchalance when really we’re overthinking every word! Ah, young love :)

I love this!! Gives me courage to make the first move and ask guys I like out in the future. Thanks Joanna!

I know how this story ends but I want to read your other emails! Such a lovely glimpse of your dynamic together ?

Love it!

I sent my partner a message (while I was living in the states) to tell him that I thought he had a beautiful face. I still think that. He’s one of the cutest boys I’ve ever dated. Anyway he lived in London but I figured “a little flirtation never hurt nobody”. He opened this message while standing on Peckham Rye train platform and thought
“What’s the point, this girl lives in the states?”
But against his sensible nature he decided to respond because it was (in his own words) “only polite”. Almost five years later, we live in London together, we are married and quite often we take the train from Peckham Rye, together. And I always think about it and smile.

I absolutely love this! I also asked my husband out for our first date. I had two ticket to the Cairo Opera House for Daniel Barenboim conducting Symphony 5 Beethoven (from my mom who is a Journalist). I wore a white summer dress. We’ve been together ever since, married for 7 years now with a 4 year old :).
I specially like you sharing this because there was this tiny bit in me that felt self conscious about asking him out, and this increases more my confidence that asking him that way was a very good decision.

Today marks 25 years since my husband and I met at a large London nightclub – he from Africa and myself from Australia.
I still have the train ticket that he wrote his number on that night! We moved to the US after knowing each other 3 months and got engaged two years later. We then spent 12 months apart – me back in Australia and sent emails (a new thing at the time) every day! I printed them all out and we have a big folder full of them! 22 years married – 2 kids – moved continents again! Maybe since we are in Iso we should break out the folder and re read those emails!

Thank you for sharing! For an anniversary present, I made my now-wife a book of our early emails from before we started dating. It’s fun to look back at them and reminisce as well as also remind ourselves how head-over-heels we both were back then, at those times when we both need a little boost. Those email accounts are now long-gone, so I’m glad I had saved those emails.

I love your letter. Written just right. So happy you took the initiative.
My story involves no sophisticated writing. I met this dreamy guy at a picnic my friend and I crashed. We talked for hours, played badminton, it was just perfect. Saw him again on campus months later. Sadly, couldn’t remember his name. I remembered he had brought croissants to the picnic. So I yelled at the top of my lungs: “Hey, Croissant Man.” He eventually, after insistent shouting, turned around and saw me wave frantically. He laughed and made his way towards me. We married and are celebrating our silver wedding anniversary this year. We have 2 college-aged children. Funny side note…when we told this story to our cherubs when they were younger, one of them asked….”Why didn’t you just call out Papa?”….hilarity ensued.

Also note the time difference between emails – Alex didn’t play it cool and respond 2 days later. You have to keep that banter/energy going so I am glad he responded an hour later!

BEST POST EVER!!!

All these are so swoon-worthy!!!

My swoon story is from someone I like to think I would have married if I hadn’t (very happily) married my husband….my husband and I had been together about 6 weeks before I had to leave for 3 months on some pre-arranged world travel. Towards the end of the trip I was in Nepal and very homesick, and had been violently ill for a week before I started to feel better, and a girl I’d been travelling with for a bit decided we should go out to a bar/restaurant for dinner. After a while a very handsome man and his friend asked if they could join us.

Turns out the handsome man was an international airline pilot from Spain but lived in Dubai. He said he had to get to know me because I had the most beautiful smile in the restaurant. We chatted aaaaaalllll night and connected on so many deep levels. In the wee hours he insisted on seeing me back to my hotel. It was pouring rain and the streets were partially flooded as we tipsily navigated our way. We got to my hotel gate, breathless in the pouring rain…it was like a movie! But alas, I had just started dating my husband (and I knew he was a keeper, and lived much closer than Dubai!). It took all my strength (and the knowledge I still had a bit of an upset stomach!) not to smooch him then and there.

I went to bed dizzy, high imagining what might have been, mildly regretting not kissing him anyway, and sad of a hypothetical missed opportunity (he was leaving the next morning so I couldn’t have tracked him down even if I wanted). The next day I also checked out and reception handed me his business card that he’d dropped off that morning with a note saying that he would love to show me Dubai if I was ever in town! I still sometimes wonder what life might be like now…. that gentleman had class!!

So sweet! My husband and I met as roommates and we put the Craigslist listing and my email inquiring about the room on our wedding website. It was so funny to read how I pitched myself as the perfect roommate for him — I guess I was right!