[OPINION]: WHEN I began brainstorming for this column about all the weird and wonderful things I find on the internet, I instantly thought of my husband.

Yes, that’s right, I found my husband on the internet. And in case you’re wondering, he’s mostly wonderful but with a touch of the weird factor.

So how exactly does one find a husband on the internet? One thing is for certain, it’s not easy.

A few years ago I had just moved to Brisbane and was working in a fabric store, so I wasn’t exactly meeting an abundance of men.

So one lonely Friday night I clicked on a link for an internet dating site, and thus it began.

At first I simply put my profile online and waited for the wonderful men to come pouring into my inbox. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work. The emails came, but they all turned out to be in the category of weird things I have found online.

There was the guy who had put on 20kg since his profile photo was taken, the guy who asked me what colour underwear I was wearing about 30 seconds into our chat and, my personal favourite, the guy who asked if we should move in together after about four dates and who was actually sending dirty pictures of himself to another girl. (You were dating a journalism student, of course I was going to go through your phone.)

At about this point I realised that waiting for someone great to find me was perhaps not the best approach, so I did my own search and sent a few messages to guys I was actually interested in.

Included in this list was a young man in an orange polo with the tag line “Like blue eyes?” who I rather liked the look of.

I made the initial contact and waited nervously for his response. We chatted for the first time two days later and actually met in person for our first date about six weeks later. Being a cynic, I took my flatmates with me in case he was a dud, but it wasn’t needed. In fact he looked exactly like his profile picture and even had blue eyes. Now this was a refreshing change.

On our second date he accidentally rear-ended my car after forgetting to put the park brake on. The fact that I laughed at him instead of wanting to strangle him made me realise there had to be something there.

My parents met him six weeks later and my mother was so convinced he was the one that she bought a dress for our wedding three months after that. He wasn’t in any hurry though, so she had to wait another three years to wear it.

I sat on the details of how we met until our speech on our wedding night when I gave most of the guests, including my best friend, quite a shock as I recounted how we had really met.

On our honeymoon we were talking to a guy my husband just happens to know from an internet forum who asked us how we had met. We told him and he then told us he had met his wife through a personals ad in his local newspaper in the 80s. I guess really it's the same principle but just a different decade.

So is online dating the way to find your match? Maybe, maybe not. I’m fairly certain I just got lucky. If you have the patience to go through the duds, then yes, you just might find your perfect match. But you could also meet him at Woolies.

Heidi Costello is the Tweed Daily News online editor.

Have you met your partner in an interesting way or had a good or bad internet dating experience? I'd love to hear about it - leave me a comment below.