Alyssa Hu$tle
Member
It was the day after Christmas in 2004, I was blog-surfing; perusing random blogs for something interesting. And I happened to stumble upon Tommie Hu$tle telling his story about life as a contractor in Iraq (HTTP://tommiehustle.blogspot.com/).
Normally I would have skipped to the next blog; the war disgusted me and I was not interested in any Iraq propaganda. But, his writing style was interesting, candid and funny, and it captured my attention and drew me in... I soon became an avid reader.
I started leaving comments, and not long after we started exchanging emails. It was about this time that he introduced me to GAF. Of course, no one at GAF believed I was a female in real life and gave me endless grief! Tommie came to my rescue on a few occasions claiming to be an ex-boyfriend, however in reality we had never physically met.
We talked more and more when I say 'talked' however, it was purely an exchange of emails and banter on GAF. (The bandwidth of the network at the time was such that it couldn't support any chat engines or anything like that, and this was before gmail-chat came along). I was his escape from the war, and he was my confidant. Needless to say we became close.
After his tour in Iraq was over 12 months later, he came to Australia for a week before going back to the US, and we FINALLY met in person. It was without doubt one of best weeks of my life! By this stage I was hopelessly in love with him (actually, I was hopelessly in love with him long before that, but anyway...) However, being in different countries, we never thought we would see each other again.
We continued to liaise over the Internet for a further 18 months or so, when I just couldn't cope with the situation any longer I was madly in love with this man from the Internet who lived on the other side of the planet, and it was driving me crazy (and everyone I knew thought I was crazy too). I told him either we need to do something about our situation so we could be together, or else I needed to move on with my life.
At that stage he couldn't see how it would work with his job and all the travel he had to do, so being true to my word I moved on. Living a pseudo on-line relationship wasn't what I wanted out of life. I told him it was over and completely cut him off. I barred myself from any Internet activity unless it was absolutely necessary, I stayed away from GAF, I shut down my blog, and I disappeared.
Well it seemed I left a big hole in his life. He called me after about 6 months (after I had rebuffed several email contact attempts) telling me he had made the greatest mistake of his life, he couldn't live without me and he wanted to fly me to the US to seriously talk and work out the way forward as a couple.
I said no.
But I couldn't stop thinking about him. Every now and again I would log into GAF to see what he was up to. Despite my best efforts, I was still in madly in love with him.
He went on tour to Iraq again in 2007, and contacted me one more time. This time I relented. The next thing we were confessing our continued love for each other, and decided we would get married. (Mind you, at this stage we had still only spent a week together in 'real' life!)
He flew back to Australia in March 2008 and met my family. Then I flew to the US in June that year to meet his, and he formally proposed. Then as soon as I went back to Australia we started the immigration process for my permanent return.
I moved countries in June 2009 and we got married on 28th. And he we are today, Mr and Mrs Hustle!
Edit: Tommie asked me to add the links to the videos I made him to this first post, so here they are:
Happy Birthday to Tommie in Iraq, 2007
Merry Christmas to Tommie in Iraq, 2007
Normally I would have skipped to the next blog; the war disgusted me and I was not interested in any Iraq propaganda. But, his writing style was interesting, candid and funny, and it captured my attention and drew me in... I soon became an avid reader.
I started leaving comments, and not long after we started exchanging emails. It was about this time that he introduced me to GAF. Of course, no one at GAF believed I was a female in real life and gave me endless grief! Tommie came to my rescue on a few occasions claiming to be an ex-boyfriend, however in reality we had never physically met.
We talked more and more when I say 'talked' however, it was purely an exchange of emails and banter on GAF. (The bandwidth of the network at the time was such that it couldn't support any chat engines or anything like that, and this was before gmail-chat came along). I was his escape from the war, and he was my confidant. Needless to say we became close.
After his tour in Iraq was over 12 months later, he came to Australia for a week before going back to the US, and we FINALLY met in person. It was without doubt one of best weeks of my life! By this stage I was hopelessly in love with him (actually, I was hopelessly in love with him long before that, but anyway...) However, being in different countries, we never thought we would see each other again.
We continued to liaise over the Internet for a further 18 months or so, when I just couldn't cope with the situation any longer I was madly in love with this man from the Internet who lived on the other side of the planet, and it was driving me crazy (and everyone I knew thought I was crazy too). I told him either we need to do something about our situation so we could be together, or else I needed to move on with my life.
At that stage he couldn't see how it would work with his job and all the travel he had to do, so being true to my word I moved on. Living a pseudo on-line relationship wasn't what I wanted out of life. I told him it was over and completely cut him off. I barred myself from any Internet activity unless it was absolutely necessary, I stayed away from GAF, I shut down my blog, and I disappeared.
Well it seemed I left a big hole in his life. He called me after about 6 months (after I had rebuffed several email contact attempts) telling me he had made the greatest mistake of his life, he couldn't live without me and he wanted to fly me to the US to seriously talk and work out the way forward as a couple.
I said no.
But I couldn't stop thinking about him. Every now and again I would log into GAF to see what he was up to. Despite my best efforts, I was still in madly in love with him.
He went on tour to Iraq again in 2007, and contacted me one more time. This time I relented. The next thing we were confessing our continued love for each other, and decided we would get married. (Mind you, at this stage we had still only spent a week together in 'real' life!)
He flew back to Australia in March 2008 and met my family. Then I flew to the US in June that year to meet his, and he formally proposed. Then as soon as I went back to Australia we started the immigration process for my permanent return.
I moved countries in June 2009 and we got married on 28th. And he we are today, Mr and Mrs Hustle!
Edit: Tommie asked me to add the links to the videos I made him to this first post, so here they are:
Happy Birthday to Tommie in Iraq, 2007
Merry Christmas to Tommie in Iraq, 2007
Seriously though, that's my one dick comment of the thread. This is an awesome story, congrats!