The sweetest gesture (to a geek)

It's no secret we met video gaming. We're both gamers -- in our own way. He's much more experienced and varied in his choices of types of games and consoles. He loves variety whereas I'm much more focused - I tend to pick a game or two and play them to death. I'll play the same games for years before I'm ready to move on.

For us, gaming has been huge. We met role-playing in our video game. (I was his female character's mom...  he used to type in group chat "MOMMY!!!!" whenever I logged in. I'd completely forgotten about this until he reminded me a couple of weeks ago.)  When we moved in, we still played the same video game, this time across the room rather than across hundreds of miles.

We also branched out to Wii games (my console) and I tried to learn to play his Xbox. I'd never even picked up a controller and it was very frustrating to learn. I tried but we kept reverting to simpler Wii games out of my frustration.  He continued to play Xbox solo.

I watched him play his Xbox. He told me about when he could afford the subscription and he would play Halo and how much he enjoyed playing and trash talking. It's not something I would ever be interested in (or even interested to hear) but I admired the skill that goes into something like that. It wasn't just the skill of playing... it was the excited passion you see when someone genuinely enjoys something. His eyes would light up.

Once I was watching him play solo and I remember seeing the "Killionaire" award flash across the screen. I didn't think much of it until I read in the news the next day how its the rarest title awarded in Halo 4 due to the difficulty of achieving it: 10 deaths in 36 seconds (each one within 4 seconds of the last). I asked him about it the next time I saw it pop across the screen. I would die to achieve that level of playing in a game I loved. To him, it was no big deal. It happened so often he'd stopped taking notice of it.

A couple of months ago, we were playing our favorite game together (Lord of the Rings Online, aka LOTRO, aka where we met) and I asked him how many points he had saved to buy an expansion that had recently come out.  (For background: he was gifted a subscription last year that awards 500 points a month to be used in the store for content, bonuses, etc. Since we're tight on cash to spend on frivolous things like extra gaming content, we'd been saving these points to buy new content.)

It turns out, he'd been spending his points on other perks rather than saving them, so he couldn't buy the content and wouldn't have the points for another three months or so. I had just purchased the content with my saved points and was really disappointed. And a bit angry. We were supposed to be saving to play content together... and now we'd have three months of gaming where he couldn't join me in this new area.

It was a huge disappointment, but not the end of the world. Three months would pass quickly.

The next day when I came home from work, he asked if I wanted to join him in playing the new content. I had no idea what he was talking about - he couldn't afford it yesterday. I asked him what had changed.

He said, "I sold my Xbox."

It took a moment to sink in. "You did what!?"

"I sold my Xbox."

"But..... WHY?"

"So we could play together," he shrugged it off.

"But.... but... your Xbox! Honey... I never expected you to...or wanted you to..."

"I know. But we don't play it together and I'm not really interested in playing solo anymore and this way we get to do everything together. I didn't like how disappointed you were yesterday."

I had no words at this point. Tears in my eyes I just hugged him. What else could I do? He just sold something that had been one of his prized possessions in order to pay for gaming content we could play together.

It's the most romantic gesture I've ever heard of or received and I can't express the incredible love I have for a man to love me so much, he'll sell his Xbox to spend more time with me.

One day, I'm going to buy him a new one.