Chapter Text
r/offmychest • Posted by u/ mememington13 55 mins ago
I(26 M) ‘masterminded’ my way into a relationship with my internet best friend (23 M). Now we live together and have a cat.
Throwaway account because I don’t want this on my main but my boyfriend was listening to the new Taylor Swift album (which was great btw his favorite song is Karma) and one of the songs caught my attention.
I saw on Tiktok the trend where people would describe their ‘mastermind’ moments and I wanted to chip in but I didn’t want to include my face in it so here I am!
We first met because he needed someone to code a server for him and I was listed on this developer website. He didn’t know how to code at that time so he really wanted my help on it. I was busy with uni so I only messaged back after a few days and we exchanged little words then he ended up ghosting me before we even got to the coding part. He asked a lot of questions and I could tell he was genuinely interested in learning code so I was excited to talk to him about the process since I thought his idea was cool and would get the attention of a lot of people. I was ultimately disappointed when we didn’t get to. I just figured he found someone else to do it or he learned how to do it himself (he seemed like the type to want to be directly involved in the process of things so I understood.)
Fast forward into the future, I was on my way to graduating and it had been some time since we talked. I was messing around on my computer and one of my friends sent me a link to this server that seemed awfully familiar. It was the server that I was meant to code for that guy. I didn’t know how he managed to learn code so quickly, much less execute it on such a big scale, but it was impressive and I felt the urge to talk to him again. I went back to my friend that had sent me the link in the first place and asked questions about what the server was for and who made it. I acted dumb and pretended like I didn’t recognize the idea and just talked about how cool it was and how I wanted to see the code. My friend is super outgoing and friendly so it didn’t talk long for him to suggest introducing us to each other. I said sure and asked him to give the guy my teamspeak handle and, like taylor said, watched as the dominoes cascaded in a line.
He recognized my ign immediately since it was what I used for everything. He told me about how I had ghosted him and how I ignored his messages. I pretended like I forgot about him and our whole interaction so his interest would hopefully be piqued. We spent the day playing games together and I showed him some of the stuff I had coded and he ended up admitting to me that I was one of the reasons why he learned to code. Turns out we shared a lot of interests and had a lot of common friends that it was inevitable that we would have met.
I don’t know why but I really wanted him to be my friend and that is something I will never admit to him because I know he’ll never let it go. I made sure to be online when he was and to play the games that he frequented, even though I liked other games as well. I started becoming great friends with his friends and it didn't take long for them to start including me in their circle. I realize it sounds kinda weird that I wormed my way into his life like that but I swear it’s not as bad as it sounds. I’ve always been a little closed off and private about my life but something about him just made me want to open up.
Soon I found myself talking to him almost every day. I live in England and he’s all the way over in America so the time difference was something we had to overcome. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, talking to him all day and well into the night was really easy and enjoyable so it wasn’t much of an issue. Our schedules started to sync up and because of that we were often left alone by our friends since no one wanted to stay up too late or wake up too early.
We ended up working together, naturally. Our skills in our specific field worked well together so it just made sense. He asked me to come with and I did. The only problem was the work wasn’t a guaranteed success. We didn’t know if it would turn out right or if we would crash and burn because everything was so fickle. My mum came to me asking me to reconsider everything. To get a proper office job, settle down, and find a nice girl to start a family with. I never told him this but I cried to her that day. I asked her to give me a chance and to prove that he knew what he was doing— that this was something that could work for us. I never ask her for much but I remember thinking that I would beg for her to see the potential in him the way that I did. She decided on an ultimatum. One whole year. One year to prove that our plans would work out or I give it up and make a life for myself. So I gave it my all. I worked as hard as I could to support him and to help him get to that success I knew was just waiting for him at the end of the year. It didn’t even take a year. Within months I was seeing him and his passion flourish. I saw him grow from this person I talked to online to someone I had to share with the rest of the world.
I didn’t know it yet but I was already falling for him. (Mum didn’t tell me until I was packing up to move but she knew I was.)
Soon people started picking up on how I felt about him. I tried to hide it. I changed the way I spoke to him when other people were around. I treated him like any other friend, but I’d go back to our usual dynamic when we were in private.
To give some perspective, he’s extremely open about his affections. He will tell everyone that he loves how much they mean to him. He’s the kind of person to go out of his way to help people. He also likes getting a reaction out of me because I’m not as showy as he is. He would tease me and make jokes about how much he loves me. He’d flirt with me and rile me up just to get me to tell him ‘I love you.’ He doesn’t mind letting the whole world know how he feels so it didn’t matter if we were on a call alone or with 10 other people, he would act the same way either way.
When I realized I was in love with him it was uneventful. Just the two of us, alone, in a 4-hour long call with each other while our other friends hung out in a different group chat. The realization that I would spend hours with him doing nothing instead of talking with my friends was enough. I know myself well enough that it wasn’t a difficult realization to come to.
That night was the first night I thought about living with him.
We made it work somehow. That was almost 7-8 years ago. Now I’m writing this in our room with our cat in my lap while he’s in the kitchen making us breakfast while our other best friend is sleeping in his room. We got together a couple of months ago and I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. I can’t imagine my future without him. Sometimes I look at him and see the kid that didn’t know code trying to get me to make his project work for him and it fills me with gratitude. I don’t necessarily believe in a higher being but I think there’s no way some divine force wasn’t at work here. I never thought I’d end up with him but life is funny like that.
u/memeington13 • 8 minutes ago
UPDATE: who the fuck is dnf