The Great Unknown

by Beverly Tjerngren

I was a fairly late arrival on the Internet scene, not surfing the Web until the fall of 1997, and not being online at home until the spring of 2000. For reasons inexplicable to me now, I just wasn't especially interested. Oh, I'd go to the library now and again and use their computers to find specific information, and occasionally I'd play around a bit on a friend's computer, but just sitting around surfing didn't appeal to me.

A few years ago I was expecting a fairly sizable tax refund and I had been planning to have a bit of cosmetic dentistry done (oh, vanity!). I was talking it over with my best friend from high school, who lived some 350 miles away from me, and she said, "No, no!" when she heard my plans. "Get a computer ... then we can chat!" I was skeptical about this chatting business and said so, but she didn't give up trying to convince me. After a month or so of similar conversations with other friends and family members, I finally caved and bought my first computer.

Of course, I fell in love with the Internet and with the possibilities it represented. You can find anything online. Among other things, I found a husband. That's not so uncommon these days--in fact, a good many of my colleagues here at Mosaic Minds met their guys the same way I met mine--but it really threw my nearest and dearest for a loop when they heard about it. Not only was I romantically involved with a man I met online (and it was a "true" chance online meeting, not one engineered by those internet dating services that are becoming so popular) but I was planning to move in with him. In Sweden. With my small daughter in tow.

When Olof picked my daughter and me up at the airport in Stockholm on that cold January morning in 2001, we had never met face-to-face. In retrospect, I can't help thinking that it was crazy and reckless to make such a bold move. We were far from strangers, of course. We'd been talking more or less every day for eight months, not infrequently spending four or five hours on the phone in a single day. But still...what if it didn't work out the way I had planned? What on earth would I do then? I did have a return ticket (I was crazy, not stupid), but there was still a lot of room for things to go wrong.*

Three-and-a-half years later, I'm still in Sweden, and Olof and I have gotten married, bought a house, and given my daughter a little brother. We have a rock-solid relationship and I'm quite happy in my new life (although it doesn't feel so "new" anymore; it's just "my life" now). Sometimes, though, I still think about how it could have been, if we hadn't "clicked" in person or if I hadn't liked living in Sweden or if my daughter hadn't thrived in her new surroundings. In the end, though, I would rather have had our relationship fail, still having had the experience, than to have spent the rest of my life wondering, "What if I had gone to Sweden? What if he was the one?"

These days I mostly wonder, "What if I hadn't bought a computer?" Somehow I think that having met Olof was well worth the sacrifice of a movie-star smile.

*I feel it important to point out that I had done enough research to know that neither I nor my daughter was ever in any physical danger. Had I not been sure of that, there is no way I would ever have made the trip.