James & Sally
We met through the help of Love by Lira. I once signed up for a dating site, but I was utterly clueless about how the whole thing works. I was so into myself, and I wasn't comfortable putting my picture on a public site for everyone to see.
One day, I was in a board meeting, and I received an email from LoveByLira, but I ignored it until I had free time to read my ignored emails. I was captivated by the approach of LoveByLira because of their privacy thing, and I decided to give it a trial. After registering, they sent me some profile of ladies that fitted what I was looking for. Out of the profiles, Sally was among them, wearing a Yellow dress with the most beautiful smile I've ever seen.
Luckily for me, in her profile, Sally listed one of her recently read books as Ready Player One (her niece had made her read it) and I’d recently read it for my kids and loved it. So I sent her a one-sentence note to her email: “So, how’d you like Ready Player One?” The rest is history :)
It’s been easy since the beginning, just the way it’s supposed to be.
On our first date, I accidentally had her meet me at a coffee shop that was close for Labor Day! As a result, we had to walk through my neighborhood on a beautiful September day to find an open coffee shop. Our walk was smooth, a calm and kinky way to kick things off, and we talked for a long time once we sat down with our coffees. I especially loved that she asked me questions. It seemed to me that men my age tended to want to talk about themselves, and it was often hard to get a word in edgewise. So Sally's questions about me were a huge plus.
I was married young and divorced after 3 years. After my divorce, I hit the big reset button and moved up to Chicago to go to business school. Fast forward through plenty of great guys and long-term relationships to four years ago.
I was running my own business and found that dating was even harder when you’re doing business development all day. It felt like biz-dev and dating required the same kind of energy, and when you put that energy into business development, at the very least it means you can eat!
While I always thought I’d get remarried and have my children, sometimes life requires a Plan B. Mine was “If I can’t be a mom, I’m going to be a grandma!” Which to me meant being in a relationship with a man who already had children. Happily, for me, James has two!
I decided to give LoveByLira a chance I wanted to shake things up and try something different than what I’d been doing. The most valuable thing for me from this experience was giving a dating site like this a chance.
