My shot at playing Cupid

Lisa and Andrew Jones of Lewiston met through writer Mark LaFlamme’s Facebook page. Submitted photo

Sadly, I don’t have my own riveting tale of online romance, but I AM credited with an assist and by gum, I’m pretty proud of it. It involves a witty fellow named Andrew Jones and a young lady formerly known as Lisa Garey, two people who frequently joined my Facebook threads to engage in the weird, irreverent chatter that goes on there.

Who knew demented wit was conducive to love?

As the story goes, Andrew Jones and Lisa Garey didn’t know each other, but they kept bumping into one another on my Facebook page where they were brought together essentially by wisecracks and innuendo.

“You’re funny,” Lisa tells me. “Andrew followed you on Facebook and I thought he was pretty funny, too. But there wasn’t much about him on his Facebook page. He doesn’t have pictures of himself or anything and I was like, who is this guy?”

So, Lisa did the bold thing. She sent Andrew a private message to find out more.

“Why do you keep your identity so secret?” she asked him in that first message. “Are you Batman?”

“Yes,” came Andrew’s reply. “The Michael Keaton Batman, specifically.”

What followed was a rather goofy chat about the “Batman” movie series. It looked like just simple banter from the outside, but in fact, Lisa and Andrew were getting to know each other. They were feeling each other out, learning more and more about one another through long strings of probing chatter.

“We ended up talking on Facebook every single day for a while,” Lisa says. “I think it was about a month before we met in person. He came to see me at my workplace.”

Andrew and Lisa liked each other, that was clear from the start. They had the same interests and the same sense of humor, obviously. But was it enough to build a relationship out of?

“We were just friends, just friends, just friends,” Lisa says of that early period. “We were the types of people who would never admit that they were a couple. We were both very much homebodies. We would get together maybe once a month.”

It looked pretty casual, Lisa admits, but behind the scenes, Andrew was making moves.

The message thread that started it all for Lisa and Andrew Jones. Submitted photo

“Andrew is very frugal and saves his money like Scrooge McDuck,” Lisa says. “He had paid off his Jeep and decided he wanted to buy a house. Every night, he’d send me messages. Here’s the house I’m looking at. It had a garage — that was non-negotiable for him. Somehow, it came up that he wanted me to move into the house with him, and that was not a conversation we had never had. At one point, he just looked at me and said: ‘Why do you think I’m looking for a house with a two-car garage?’ And like that, we literally went from ‘we’re just friends’ to ‘we’re just friends but we have a house together.'”

That was in May of 2016. The couple had the house and it was clear they were a match — a match that started with tomfoolery on my Facebook page, I will remind you, and things progressed from there.

In 2018, Lisa was returning from a trip to Florida with her mother when Andrew presented her with a ring.

“He said, ‘So, do you want to get married sometime?'” Lisa recalls.

We like Andrew’s style.

They were engaged in March of 2018 and married in July of the same year. I had such a role in their union that Andrew and Lisa got in touch with me while they were on their honeymoon. It’s not as weird as it sounds.

Since then, Andrew has stuck by Lisa through some health issues and personal problems. He proved to be as dedicated and loyal, Lisa says, as Batman himself. It’s been a pretty comfortable ride since.

“Very smooth sailing,” says Lisa. “It feels like you’re just hanging out with your best friend all of the time. We spend most of our days and nights just sending each other inappropriate memes. We decided before we got married that we’re not having human children. We got this dog and this is our whole world.”

Andrew and Lisa Jones will celebrate four years of married bliss this summer and man, I’m thrilled to have had a part in that.

“It worked out great,” says Andrew. “She is absolutely right when she said that it is like spending every day with your best friend. It was totally the right call to answer that message. I know it sounds corny to say, but I don’t think I’d be where I am today without Lisa in my life.”

Join me in a collective “awwww,” would you?