Did you meet your significant other while playing D&D? Does he or she still play?

(Also there’s some bullshit about protesting Valentine’s Day with a monster)

As I type this I’m catching up on an old episode of My Brother, My Brother, and Me; specifically episode 103, KORBEN DALLAS. Travis (your middlest brother) just told a story about asking a woman out while he was working and she was a customer. Actually, the story has him taking her name, then looking her up on Facebook, then asking her out that way. The brothers have mercilessly mocked him for this.

That is how I met my wife. Not mercilessly mocking, but the part where a gorgeous woman came into my bookstore, so I talked to her, then I looked her up on Facebook and fired a blind message into the ether. It should be noted that I did not, as Travis did, use any official information gathered from the book she ordered to contact her; I based it all on the 20-minute conversation we had as I sold her a pair of books. She didn’t like either of the books, but hey, married.

I came up gaming in a time and place where girls weren’t really doing that. I understand that in college girls were playing video games and so forth, even back in the early aughts, but my school? All dudes. Sorry, all men. In high school I was on the speech team, which created likely the highest-possible likelihood of finding a lady down to throw some dice (except for that one girl I had class with whose family owned a naginata). I did have one female player in my game, but the sheer logistics of “Hey Mom? I’m going to have a girl come hang out in the basement with me and the guys for like…I dunno, 12 hours? So that’s cool,” were simply not within my prowess of persuasion. That’s just my family, too; actually selling a girl’s dad on gaming–unless he himself was a gamer–was simply not happening in small-town, very religious Green River, Wyoming.

In the time since, though, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of gaming with my wife several times. There was even an abortive attempt at gaming with a girl I dated several years ago, but that doesn’t really count. My wife and I, though, have done DnD 4e, the Dresden Files RPG, Fiasco, and even a homebrew system our friend put together. Also (and I’ll come back and insert a picture here) she gave me an incredible Valentine’s Day gift this weekend by kicking the shit out of my Chaos Daemons with a small crew of proxied Orks in her first-ever game of Warhammer 40k. I had to chug a packet of future applesauce in my shame. Shame that was, of course, leavened with pure joy.

There’s been talk of swinging back into 4e, and we’re waiting for one of our friends to drop a modified Aberrant homebrew campaign on us. As cool as the theoretical idea of meeting a ladyperson while gaming is, I like that we have the story of meeting at a bookstore. It makes a better social tale, and requires considerably less explanation than “Well, we met rolling up some 5th-level characters for a Pathfinder Society game. I was a Qadiran, she was…”