Astrodienst, Seamed Nylons and 11:11 (How We Met)

The story of how we got together could be enough to write a book about (in fact…we might). To try and remember everything that happened we archived much of our correspondence at the time: our earliest conversations, dozens of emails, 100s of texts, etc. So it is more a challenge of what to leave out.

Day 1. April 11th 2009. It’s Easter long weekend, my daughter is at her moms, I’m single yet again, and have a 4 day weekend, home and alone. I’d gone through the agony of my 2nd marriage break-up the second half of the previous year, the dark nights of the soul, etc., put myself back together and got back onto the singles dating scene. Surprisingly, at 49, I was getting no end to offers and was soon going out on dates. After making contact with all the women I was interested in, I hid my profile while I waited to see if any of them turned into a relationship. I had restricted my interest to women in a similar age group, and only within 10km of where I lived.

That weekend, not having anything else to do, I started having a surf around a dating website for something to do. Eventually I stumbled into the over 50s community. Immediately I was drawn to the photo of a very attractive woman with jet-black hair. I clicked on her profile, and read it through. She was everything I was looking for…articulate, intelligent, strong, spiritual, fun, sensual, wild, sexy and clearly had a wicked side to her. I read her profile again, more reading between the lines, and feeling what she was saying, and felt incredibly drawn to her. Then I noticed she lived on the Gold Coast. I was in Sydney, and so she was over 1,000km away. Damn! I thought about it for quite some time, but felt maybe I should still send her a ‘kiss’, and make contact. Or should I? How could anything come of it? I had to go and do something else, and when I returned her profile was still sitting there. I read it again. I don’t know why, but I felt drawn to her and something just told me to send a ‘kiss’ and see where it goes. She probably wouldn’t be interested anyway, right? So I just sent it.

Before long a reply came back…. she’d ‘like to be friends’. Always nice to make a new friend, and I needed some. Who knows, she could turn out to be someone I could talk, confide and ‘bounce’ with from afar, with little risk of ever meeting. Whatever, I wrote her an email.

We exchanged a couple of emails. Straightaway they changed to not being weren’t your normal ‘nice to meet you’ emails. We went straight to the core. They were deep. There were no games or power plays. We were saying things to each other that just grabbed each other’s attention. We just said things that bounced and flowed with each other.

Soon we were talking on online chat. We talked for hours and hours and hours. The connection was obvious. At times I would be typing a question, and before I had finished or could even send it, she would answer it. Co-incidence? Anticipation? Possibly, but sometimes I was asking about something completely different to what we had been talking about. At one point, when we were exploring our sexuality a little, I nearly choked when she suddenly asked what I would do if I licked my way up the seams of her nylon stockings? I’d not mentioned anything about it, but I’ve had a huge fetish for seamed nylon stockings all my life. How could she know? Why say something so obscure so early on? It was as though she just knew. At that point I stopped and was speechless. For a moment I wondered if this was all a windup, and I was being played with in some perverse game. But then, I remembered, I had contacted her. So how could it be? She told me later it was just something she had always thought very erotic. It was as though it had been planted there for us when we finally met, to be sure to get my attention. It certainly did, and the reverse was soon to happen also.

We swapped photos, and Claire said it was as though she knew me straight away. She showed me her website. She was a music composer and arranger, as well as some singing and more recently teaching classical piano. Her music was wonderful. It was rich and sensual.

Day 2. We talked on the phone for the first time, and we talked for hours. We had experienced so many similar things in and out of relationships. We just resonated with each other. I sat alone, in the dark and we just talked. At times I saw feint lights in the room. At first I thought I was imagining it, but I saw them a number of times. I didn’t say anything about them at all till one day Claire suddenly said she saw lights in the room where she was. When I told her I had too, it freaked us out.

It had only been 2 days, and we were totally consumed with each other. We had already talked about so many things, deep personal experiences and beliefs. In some of our conversations Claire said it was like we are ‘twins’, and it was uncanny, because the amount of similarities in our lives, beliefs, experiences and desires, both past and present, was as though we were twins. Looking back through our texts, we’d often even start our conversations off with ‘Hello Twinness’.

Claire said she’d been looking up the whole twin feeling we had been getting, and had stumbled across something really amazing, and asked if I’d ever heard of Twin Flames? I said I hadn’t, and she sent me some links to websites. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. This whole phenomena whereby a soul splits into two identical souls, and they spend lifetime after lifetime, growing and learning, with one remaining in spirit and guiding the other who incarnates into a life, finally culminating in their final incarnation with them both being alive at the same time, and finding each other, was something I had never heard of before. The descriptions of twin flames gave me goose-bumps. Looking through the long lists, it would be ‘yep’, ‘yep’, ‘yep’, for just about every aspect (personally we don’t think there is any hard check list to determine if you are twin flames or not, but it gave us a close idea of what people think they are). It made sense of so many things we were experiencing in such a short period of time. We’d both be online googling and reading more and more about twin flames, and everything we found seemed to fit. It was hard to believe. It was hard to say it was us, but all the things we were experiencing were there written down by other people as things that happen to Twin Flames.

Day 3. I dreamed that I’d moved to Queensland to live with Claire and texted her that morning to tell her. Surprisingly, she just encouraged me. I guess when you know exactly what you’re looking for; it’s easy to be completely honest with each other without beating around the bush. Somehow, we both wanted exactly the same thing, but this was happening so very quickly. No dipping my toe in to test the water here. I was plunging in head first and she was right there beside me, yet we hadn’t even cast eyes on each other. Something was happening on a very deep level. Pure spirit. Pure heart. Pure soul.

Day 4. I remember going to work and the feelings I was having. I had to face it; they were the feelings of being in love. I thought I couldn’t be in love that quickly, surely. Could I? I thought about it all day and in the end had to accept I was in love with her already. It didn’t make sense. It was crazy. It defied all my experience and sensibility. After only 3 days, it sounded like infatuation? Immaturity? But it was true. I was. I had to accept it. I gave myself over to my feelings and followed them.

Day 5. I’ve had an interest in lots of spiritual aspects for some time. One of them is a belief in Astrology. Over the weekend as Claire and I had been getting to know each other, I found out her date and place of birth. Without saying anything, I went to Astrodienst.com and had a look at her birth chart. I also ran a compatibility check to see how we were suited. It said we were a very potent combination. I bought the full compatibility report (not something I’d ever gone as far as doing before).

Day 6. Before setting off for work I emailed the Astro report to Claire (you have to buy it to see the full report). She absolutely freaked. She had already done the same thing to me, been to Astrodienst and checked out my birth chart, and run our compatibility report. She had always done this with potential relationships before, but never told anyone, or met a guy that also did it, never mind email the report to her!

Everyday we talked all day. Via texts when I was at work. Online chat when I got home. Highlight of the day was talking on the phone all evening till the early hours of the morning, or later. As I sat in the dark talking on the phone, nightly there would be lights appearing in the room. I had never seen or experienced anything like it before. We never ran out of anything to say, never had any of those uneasy pauses. We just always flowed. We talked about everything. Daily we wondered why we had to meet but be so far apart? We felt a huge physical attraction to each other as well. Claire used to joke it was so intense that if we had been within driving distance, we would have met and had decadent sex on the first night. One night I realised why…it was so we would meet and experience falling in love totally, before sex could get in the way. If we had met on the first night and made sex a part of our relationship from the beginning, we might one day look back and wonder if it was all about lust? And was there really love underneath? So we had been given the gift of always being able to look back and know we fell in love before we had even met, before sex was even part of the equation and our relationship was built on pure love from the soul.

Day 8. Saturday came, and I had an appointment. Not your ordinary appointment though. It had made about a month prior. I had been looking for a good spiritual counsellor or medium, someone credible, to go and see. I’d been before, but not for some years. When I was googling online for someone I empathised with, I kept coming across the same counsellor’s profile in about 4 different places. It was as though I was being told to ring her, so I did. She was astounded I’d found her profile at all, as she had stopped counselling a number of years earlier, and had removed all the profiles she knew of. Yet I came across her in about 4 different places! Anyway, she said she didn’t do it, but the person who taught her did, Christine, and she put me in contact with her. I arrived at Christine’s, and went in and we started. I always take a bit of a sceptical view, and try not to give anything away, one way or the other, body language, re-enforcement, etc., so I can gauge if I feel it was credible. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere for a while, till Christine suddenly said, I had just met ‘The One’. She said this was the woman I had waited all my life for, and I was the one she had waited for. She described her very accurately, wicked, very wicked, but had been hurt a lot in the past, very badly, along with a number of other aspects. The she announced she was my ‘twin’. I choked and not giving anything away, asked what a twin was? She told me about twin flames, and pointed to the walls at either end of the room, and there was a larger flame on either side, which said represented her and her husband…twin flames. She carried on, and came out with quite a number of other things that fitted exactly what Claire and I had been discovering and experiencing (and none that didn’t). I turned 3 cards over, and the first one was ‘Wholeness’. She said that fitted in with being ready for meeting my twin. I’d never considered myself ‘whole’ far from it (in fact in most previous relationships I’d been ground down and made to feel like I was worthless). The whole twin thing was taking on a new dimension, and I was starting to wonder if it was real?

Day 10. Twin flames raises it head a third time. Claire’s autistic son, Rick, loves to do Angel Cards. He has a number of packs of them, and Claire had told me earlier that he was uncannily accurate with the cards he draws out for people. He asked if he could draw one for us, and he drew out the ‘twins’ card. A card he had never drawn out for anyone before.

Some nights we would talk till 4:30am, leaving me only 2 hours sleep before having to get up for work. Even on nights we tried to get some sleep we would still send texts right through the night. On many occasions I would wake up only for my mobile to start beeping with an incoming text message about 20 seconds later. It was as though I knew it was coming. Other times, and very frequently, I would wake up in the night and send a text, and as I hit send, would receive one from Claire at exactly the same time. We had been typing them to each other at precisely the same time.

We had to meet up. A 1,000km is a long way to drive. I had my daughter living with me 80% of the time, and Claire had an autistic son in a wheelchair, so she couldn’t travel at all. Claire begged me to come up so we could meet. It was a choice between flying up now for a quick 1-2 day meeting, or scheduling some time off work in a week or two, and coming up for longer. So I booked 4 days off work, across a weekend, so I could fly up and stay 6 days. So it would be 18 days since we first connected online before we finally met.

The wait went on for what seemed like an eternity. We counted the days down. 8 days to go. We talked constantly everyday. 6 days. All day, all night, 24 x 7. 5 days. Texts, emails, chat, phone calls. 4 days. I was living on about 2 hours sleep a night, doing a full time job and looking after a daughter. 3 days. I don’t know where all the stamina came from, but it just did! 2 days. It was exhilarating. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. We would talk for hours and hours, and it felt like minutes.

Day 19. The day finally came on the 29th April 2009. I rang Claire from the departure gate for one last chat, boarded my plane, and took off.

The plane landed and I disembarked. My heart was pounding, as I walked through the terminal. I approached the exit, stopped and stood there for a moment, wondering how the next few minutes would unfold. Could I really be in love with someone I’d never met before and just as remarkably, could she be as crazy about me without ever seeing what I actually looked like? This was it.

I walked out through security and through the glass partition, whilst frantically scanning the area. Straight away I saw her jet-black hair, heavy makeup against a white jacket. As I walked out, our eyes met lasering into each other and into my heart, my soul and down into my groin. She smiled and slowly walked towards me. She was gorgeous. Totally. All that mattered now, was if it was mutual. So I didn’t say anything. She ran into my arms, giving me the biggest hug and we held each other really closely experiencing for the first time the way each other smelt, felt, and looked in the flesh. Our bodies were perfect for each other. She grabbed my hand and our fingers locked together, as though they were designed to fit together. Made together. The feeling of already knowing each other and finally being together was so intense. As we walked over towards the baggage collection, she leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘you’re gorgeous’. From that point on, I knew we were going to be. We stood there gripping each other’s hands and grinning at each other. I leaned over to her and told her I thought she was gorgeous too. Other than that, we barely talked. We were just together, and knew we were always meant to be.

My bag came through and we walked out of the terminal, hand in hand. The rest of the world had stopped. We got to her beat up old car she was so embarrassed about and after putting my bag in her boot, I took her hand and pulled her over, wrapped my arms around her and we kissed. It felt like heaven.

As we drove down the highway she kept looking at me, one hand on the steering wheel, one foot up on her seat, grinning and going ‘fuck’. Telling me how good looking she thought I was (which I found hard to believe). It took me a while to realise she really was serious (gulp). We stopped at Mermaids bar right on a Gold Coast beach. We sank into a leather sofa together and ordered champagne. She plonked one of her legs over my thigh and nestled her head into my shoulder. It was like it was always meant to be. As we sat there in bliss, we both just knew this was the beginning of being together forever.

We headed off to her unit up at Hope Island, and I met her son, Rick. He is autistic, but somehow Claire’s determination not to allow him to give in to it had turned him around to the point you would hardly notice his autism anymore. He was 24 and in a wheelchair. He had beaten leukaemia three times, and had a bone marrow transplant, but the drugs that stopped him rejecting the bone marrow had destroyed his hips and he couldn’t walk anymore, and so had been in a wheel chair for nearly 3 years.

We spent 6 blissful days together at Hope Island. We just sat and talked, and drank and made love. We didn’t live by any clock; sometimes we’d sleep in the day, and be up at all hours of the night. One night we even drove all the way over to the coast and sat on the beach to watch the sunrise. It was as though our lives had just started. As though we had both been on long, painful journeys, but had finally reached our destination. Everything felt right about each other, and for the first time in both our lives we were both truly adored for just being ourselves. We didn’t have to put on any act, or be on best behaviour. It was just right without any effort.

Getting on that plane after 6 days together was hard. But made easier knowing it was just the beginning, not the end, and we would be together.

Day 25. I flew back to Sydney and quit my job and gave notice on my home. The sheer speed and intensity of us merging our lives together had a momentum of what felt like a light year passing every day. Claire even said she felt her DNA was being reprogrammed, because within this time, she felt lighter and had more energy also, although we both only averaged two hours sleep a night and still could not spend enough time together. There was absolutely no way we could physically bear to be apart any longer. We just had to be together now. 11:11 kept running through my mind and how twin flames were somehow always connected to that number. I realised that on the 11th day our souls had met and on the 29th day our bodies had finally met too. That added up to 11:11 and I was suddenly tingling from the zillion shivers crawling up and down my spine.