Megan Evans courted danger at 3 a.m. one morning in early 2000 when she agreed to meet a stranger after only an hour of online chatting. While Evans’ story turned out well, it easily could have ended in tragedy.
That’s why she lied for three years about how she met Stefan Shimonek and why she warns other single women: “I would not advise others to do it. I just happened to get very lucky.”
Meet: Evans Shimonek met in a chat room about 2 a.m. and agreed to rendezvous at a Denny’s. He arrived first. “I pretty much figured if I finished my orange juice and she wasn’t there, then she’d blown me off,” says Shimonek.
A chronically late Evans arrived just in time. They spent the next four or five hours talking, but neither thought past the spur-of-the-moment adventure. Shimonek went back to the University of Northern Colorado. Evans, a recent graduate of JFK high school, stayed in Denver and worked. Yet the phone calls and visits began. They dated into spring but not exclusively.
Match: Come May, Evans asked Shimonek to define the relationship. He avoided answering through sarcasm, but they found a workable deal. “We never actually said we were ‘boyfriend and girlfriend,”‘ Evans says. “We just said we weren’t going to date anybody else.”
They simply had fun with dates to the movies, loads of miniature golf and just hanging out. “He makes me laugh,” Evans says.
“She’s easy to make laugh,” Shimonek says. “It’s always much better to hang out with people who laugh at your jokes.”
The romance went well, almost too well. Shimonek broke up with Evans six months later. “I’ve always been scared of commitment,” he says. “And, it started feeling like it was getting too serious, so I pulled the plug on it, and I realized later it was probably the biggest mistake of my life.”
“I wanted him to be happy,” Evans says. “If he was more happy without me than with me, then I was just going to deal with that, but I still wanted to be friends with him because he’s a really good guy.”
The breakup lasted eight months, until Shimonek got the gumption to tell Evans he loved her. “It was very tough for me because I knew I’d made a mistake, and if I tried to make amends for it and she shot me down, it would be just terrible,” he says.
Marry: The reconciliation indeed stuck, and some 180 guests filled the upper level of the Lone Tree Golf Club to watch Evans and Shimonek exchange personal vows, including promises to laugh and cry, listen and honor. The bride’s uncle, Robert Lupton, performed the ceremony and teased them that “love is the only disease that makes everyone sick, except the two people that have it.”
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