True love can sometimes be found right at our fingertips.
Especially when those fingertips are on a computer keyboard.
The following couples found love, probably the oldest defining
characteristic of humankind, in a very modern way – via the
Internet.
Joe and Lori DeAngelis of Bradford met online in September of
2005, and were married last June. After what some might call a
whirlwind romance, the couple will celebrate their first
Valentine’s Day together as a married couple today.
“At the time (we met), I was dating someone but I wasn’t happy,”
Joe DeAngelis said. So he got online and looked at a dating service
site; he started looking through profiles and noticed one that
interested him.
“What was funny about that,” he said, was his future wife was
just entering her profile when he “popped up and started talking to
her.
“We talked for a little bit … I didn’t even know where Bradford
was,” DeAngelis said, adding he lived in Beaver Falls at the time.
“I told her ‘I’m really better at talking in person or over the
phone.'” He said he gave her his telephone number, and she
called.
“I remember that was a Friday night,” DeAngelis said, “and it
took me that day and the next day to convince her to meet me.” So,
the couple met for the first time in person that Sunday, he
said.
“I was kind of just looking for someone to go out to eat with or
have coffee with,” Lori DeAngelis said of her expectations of
Internet dating. “I had met other people online before, but they
just never struck my interest like Joe did.”
Joe DeAngelis drove 184 miles from his home to Bradford and had
dinner with his future wife at Pizza Hut. She tried to excuse
herself after dinner, saying she had to go to church, he said.
“I was interested in her, so I asked her ‘Can I go to church
with you?'” he said. “She was a little apprehensive, but what she
didn’t tell me was that she pretty much was church. Her mother is
the pastor … all her family is involved,” he said.
“She sat with me for awhile and then said ‘I have to go up
front.’ So, she left me there and the next thing I knew she
starting singing. I fell in love, and that was that,” DeAngelis
said.
Three weeks later he asked her to marry him.
“It has worked out great,” DeAngelis said of his relationship
with his bride from the Web. “I was married before for 26 years and
never knew what it was to be happy. We are both happier now than
ever before in our whole lives.”
The DeAngelises were married in Beaver Falls, he said. Then he
sold his house and relocated to Bradford.
Their plans for today, DeAngelis said, could not be divulged to
The Era Monday, DeAngelis chuckled, at least with his wife
listening in.
Henry and Jerrianne Chmielefski of Millersburg also met online,
they said Tuesday, and went on to marry.
Jerrianne Chmielefski, a native of Bradford and 1981 graduate of
Bradford Central Christian, was living in Johnstown when she first
made electronic contact with her future husband in August of 1998,
she said. He was living in Royersford near Philadelphia.
Her brother, Karl, had recommended a Web site, she said, and
told her it was for people who like old movies and television
shows. As it turned out, it was more of a dating service, she said,
or at least a place for singles to meet.
“I went in looking for a pen pal more than a relationship,” she
said. She made contact with the man who would become her husband
and started talking about old movies and television shows. She said
Henry Chmielefski used to own a comic book store and was familiar
with many of her favorite old cartoons.
A friendly relationship that started with Superman and “The
Herculoids” went on for about 1 1/2 years, she said, before the
couple actually met. By that time, in April of 2000, Jerrianne
Chmielefski was now living in South Carolina. They had both
experienced the death of close family members, and she decided she
was traveling up to Pennsylvania to help him through his
sorrow.
“I said ‘I’m coming there to be with you,'” she said, to which
Henry Chmielefski replied that he could handle the hard time and
take care of funeral arrangements by himself. But his future wife
insisted, saying ” I’ll come to help you get through it.”
“We had sent pictures back and forth, so I’m not sure you could
say it was love at first sight, but I knew I would marry him when I
met him … it took my breath away,” she said.
They visited once a month in May and June. When he visited her
in South Carolina the following July, he asked her to marry
him.
“I said ‘yes’ immediately,” Jerrianne Chmielefski said. “When
you’re corresponding over the Internet … writing it all out … you
get to know a lot about a person. There are many unguarded moments
when you write things you wouldn’t normally say.”
They were married Nov. 18, 2000.
Their Valentine’s Day plans include a holiday banquet at their
church, in addition to her annual tradition of sending her husband
flowers because “the guys never get the flowers,” she said.
