YouTube post leads to a visit and a proposal
Since he posted his cellphone number on YouTube in April, in a quest to "be there" for lonely souls around the world, Ryan Fitzgerald has spoken to tens of thousands of strangers about everything from the meaning of life to what they should eat for lunch.
But the 20-year-old Southbridge man never really stopped talking to Kara Lael Fraim, a lively young woman from upstate New York, who struck him as "like me, but a girl." Their first conversation lasted nine hours. A few days later, Fitzgerald boarded a bus to upstate New York for a visit.
"You're going to think I'm absolutely nuts, and I feel kind of nuts," he said in a phone interview yesterday from her home in Cohoes, N.Y. "But I guess you can say we're engaged."
No one could be more surprised at this turn of events than Fitzgerald, who said he posted his phone number because he wanted to help people, not, he said, as a ploy to meet women.
"Oh, God, no," he said, when asked by the Globe in April whether his motivations were in any way romantic. "If I want a date, I'll go to
Fitzgerald is unemployed, with plans to attend community college. But on the Internet, where 15 minutes of fame is a lifetime or two, he is a self-made man.
In the first 24 hours after he posted his number, the calls rolled in by the thousands. CNN and the BBC came calling, he said. He did interviews on radio stations from Australia to Iceland, NBC whisked him to New York City, where "we had $10 cheeseburgers every night."
He now has 16,000 friends on MySpace and receives about 150 text messages a day from virtual chums across the planet. (He declined to say how he pays for all those minutes, but allowed that he is now personally acquainted with the media relations executives of his provider, T-Mobile.)
But Fraim, 18, who likes to sing and write poetry, was unaware of the media frenzy surrounding her beau-to-be. She discovered his YouTube post during her wanderings on the Web. Fraim, who lost a brother to suicide, felt a kinship with this man who had reached out to a world of strangers. She had used video diaries on the Internet to connect with others in pain.
But she was "too embarrassed" to call him, she said, so she sent an instant message instead.
Several days and many hours of phone conversation later, she shocked herself by agreeing to let him visit her in Cohoes, where she lives with her father and younger sister. Her father, a truck driver, was skeptical: He told her to bring a friend to the bus station to pick up Fitzgerald.
"When he first got into the car, he was like totally quiet," she said. "He was wicked nervous, so he just kept answering his phone."
But the jitters faded. They say they have become soul mates, living at Fraim's house while figuring out their next move.
Neither has a job or attends school, so they spend time helping out around the house and attending to their social circles on the Internet.
On a midnight walk the other day, Fitzgerald sent a text message from a phone hidden in his hoodie sweat shirt to the phone in Fraim's purse: "Kara Lael Fraim, will you marry me?"
As she read it, he dropped to one knee and presented her with a ring he had bought at the mall.
"I couldn't speak," Fraim said. "I was just completely silent, and then I shook my head yes, and I was all smiley and giggly. I couldn't speak at all."
Some friends have told them they are too young, moving too quickly. They do not agree.
"There's no such thing as too soon," Fitzgerald said. "There's no such thing as too sudden."
They plan to move to Massachusetts, attend college, get jobs, find an apartment, and take up other constructive activities. They say they will wait to marry until Fraim is 21.
Fraim's mother, Victoria O'Donnell, who lives in Greenville, N.Y., is sanguine about the engagement.
"They're very, very happy together, and they have that mutual love of helping other people," she said. "If it works out for them, I'm very happy. All a mother ever wants is for her daughter to be happy."
But, she said with a laugh, she is also pleased that the wedding is scheduled for 2010.
Lisa Wangsness can be reached at lwangsness@globe.com. 