The spring after my A-levels was not going the way I planned. I\u00a0was\u00a019, hadn\u2019t got the\u00a0required grades for any of my university choices and hadn\u2019t saved for a gap year. My friends were off enjoying their new lives and I was stuck at home in Essex with my disappointed parents, doing occasional temp work.<\/p>\n
Then I read Join Me by the writer and comedian Danny Wallace<\/a>. I\u2019d enjoyed another book, co-written by him, Are You Dave Gorman?. I found this joyous and silly project, about grownups stumbling their way through their own lives, comforting when I had no direction. So when a friend recommended Join Me, I thought it would be a giggle too; I didn\u2019t realise it\u00a0would change my life.<\/p>\n The book was more or less about how Wallace inadvertently started a \u201cpositivity cult\u201d after posting an ad in a London newspaper that simply said \u201cJoin me\u201d. Soon, letters started pouring in. He decided to use these people for good by rallying them to commit random acts of kindness each week. It was the mid-2000s and I spent a lot of time on internet forums. Some people started to talk about the group. The concept appealed, and I duly joined in.<\/p>\n Forum members organised regular real-life Join Me meets, where they would hang out in the pub for most of the day before doing random acts of kindness, such as giving a present to a\u00a0stranger. I\u2019d been to a couple and, in June 2004, took the train to London for a meet-up on Soho\u2019s Golden Square.<\/p>\n I drunkenly posted that I thought\u00a0he was quite fit.\u00a0He replied:\u00a0Erm, thank you?<\/p>\n I was always apprehensive about meeting a bunch of strangers I had only spoken to online. One\u00a0of the first\u00a0people to approach me was an\u00a0unassuming, bespectacled, kind-looking young man wearing an awful green jacket. He offered me a homemade Join Me badge \u2013 Badge-It! machines were very popular at the time \u2013 and we didn\u2019t speak again. We\u00a0continued chatting on the forum, though, and I ran into him at meets in\u00a0Brighton and Edinburgh.<\/p>\n Then a few months later, after a night out, I drunkenly started a new thread on the forum, posting that I\u00a0thought he was quite fit. It was pretty cringe. His reply was something along the lines of: \u201cErm, thank you?\u201d In the sober light of day we both ignored it.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Then on Good Friday 2005, I went to a\u00a0meet in Nottingham, where he lived. It was the first time we\u2019d met in person since my post, and as we moved from the pub to a club, he yelled out my name, shouted: \u201cI like you, you\u2019re my favourite person!\u201d and ran up to hold my hand. We kissed \u2013 and it was the start of the rest of my life.<\/p>\n We texted, and I travelled back to Nottingham and went to a pub quiz with him, then a bowling date, where we had a proper, more sober kiss. After a month of dating, I moved in; five years later we got married.<\/p>\n During that time, I did my resits and got better grades, but I\u2019d met so many people from Join Me who had taken different paths that I realised I didn\u2019t need university at all. I got a job on the\u00a0local council and made my life in Nottinghamshire with him.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been married 15 years now. We have a beautiful house, an assortment of cats, fish, sea monkeys and ants, and\u00a0an amazing 12-year-old son who is\u00a0the best person I\u2019ve ever met. We still have a tattered copy of\u00a0Join Me on our bookshelf, and I\u00a0know\u00a0of at least 20\u00a0human beings who\u00a0exist because their parents met in\u00a0that forum.<\/p>\n I am so grateful to Danny Wallace for those silly projects, and particularly how they brought this amazing, kind, funny \u2013 and, yes, still\u00a0quite fit \u2013 man into my life.<\/p>\n Share your experience<\/p>\n Share your experiences<\/p>\n You can tell us how a cultural moment has prompted you to make a major life change by filling in the form below or emailing us on\u00a0cultural.awakening@theguardian.com.<\/p>\n Your responses, which can be anonymous, are secure as the form is encrypted and only the Guardian has access to your contributions. We will only use the data you provide us for the purpose of the feature and we will delete any personal data when we no longer require it for this purpose. For true anonymity please use our SecureDrop<\/a> service instead.Show more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The spring after my A-levels was not going the way I planned. I\u00a0was\u00a019, hadn\u2019t got the\u00a0required grades for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3571,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-3570","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}