My Wife’s Birthday

In honor of my wife’s birthday, I wanted to tell a little story.

I didn’t play Warcraft 3 at the time, and had absolutely no interest in World of Warcraft when I heard it was coming out. MMO’s sounded ridiculous to me — I have pretty strong social anxiety and the idea of playing a game at the same time as other human beings just didn’t appeal to me in the slightest. Julian, a girl I knew primarily online, and I talked about it but it wasn’t until she came to visit and actually used my computer to play the game (she was in the beta) and showed me how to play it that I started to get interested. And even then, playing a Paladin on her account, I ended up getting yelled at to heal a Deadmines run. I did not want to heal, and so, I did not enjoy that group.

But after Julian went back up to Canada, WoW became how we kept in touch. It was our instant messaging, our shared activity (I would tank and she would DPS, we ranged across Azeroth’s many dungeons)  and our evenings would often end with the two of us sitting on the dock in Menethil Harbor chatting. Once she came back down to Seattle, we settled into a groove playing in a raid guild together, which is what led to pretty much the past fifteen years of us being married.

And so many of our shared memories have involved video games — both of us yelling treasure goblin and screaming around a level in Diablo 3 trying to kill the pesky things, innumerable dungeon runs and raids together, allowing myself to be dragged along on yet another attempt to tame something I’ve never heard of, so much of it I might never have done if not for her. In a real way, without Julian, I wouldn’t be working here, I certainly wouldn’t have ever played WoW, and my life would be utterly different now. I love you, Julian. Thank you.