How one nurse 'met her musher' with the internet
Cross Country Checkup | CBC | Posted: February 16, 2016 3:36 PM | Last Updated: February 16, 2016
Megan Willard, from Haynes Junction, Yukon, didn't quite use online dating to find her match, but rather she met her partner while trying to get online with a finicky internet connection. Listen to her tell her story to Checkup guest host Suhana Meharchand, or read a partial transcript below.
Megan Willard: I tried online dating a very long time ago and like many women who use it: I'm in my mid-thirties, university-educated, and very literate. I am very picky when it comes to corresponding and I would immediately delete any messages that had with spelling or grammatical errors. I only went on one date with someone I met online and it lasted 20 minutes before I was out of there.
My father and my stepmother had actually met online and they've been married since 2001. So I did see it as a viable option.
I moved up to the Yukon in 2006 and I was happily single for two and a half years. I'm a nurse up here and I was going from place to place working in small communities.
I was headed to Europe in the fall of 2008 for three months and I stopped off at one of the local Whitehorse coffee shops to check my email before I went…but I couldn't get online—I couldn't get into one of the wireless signals. So I turned to the closest person with a computer and said, "Hey, excuse me, sorry to bother you. Are you online? Can you tell me which connection you're using? I'm having trouble." It was this very attractive, dark-haired gentleman and he told me which connection he was on. After that, I was very focused on my email. I said, "Thank you very much," and I went back to my computer.
But I could feel him looking at me. I mean, I am a certain type of girl—I'm not very well groomed a lot of the time; I don't wear makeup. I thought, "Why is that guy looking at me. This is weird."
So I turned to him. Thinking maybe I should thank him for the help and he almost jumped over his seat and said, "Hi! My name is Ryan. I just moved to the Yukon!" Then we started talking and three hours later we were still talking and the place was starting to close down. So I invited him to come to my goodbye dinner and he didn't leave until 12 o'clock at night. It was just like an instant, immediate connection.
But, he wouldn't leave my goodbye dinner until I agreed to come out to his cabin the next day to meet all of his dogs—he was a dog musher; he had like 14 dogs or something like that. So I went out we went out there and I was there for 10 hours when I really should have been packing.
I never would have met him online because he is a terrible speller and but meeting him this way, I immediately liked him.
I left for Europe and then when I came back, I just thought, "I have got to meet that musher."
Megan Willard's comments have been edited and condensed. This online segment was prepared by Ayesha Barmania.