The guy who'd never met his groomsman in person until his wedding day
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When Charles Powell was getting married last week, there was one person he wanted as a groomsman: his friend Joe Morris.
The thing is, they'd never actually met in person.
Charles, from Cincinnati, Ohio, and Joe, from Baltimore, Maryland, had known each other for 15 years, having met through an online gaming platform.
A decade and a half ago, the then-teenage Charles started playing a game called Phantasy Star Online through which he got to know Morris, Joe Walters, and William Brown.
The quartet became fast online friends: "I would come home from school and they would be online and I would be online," Charles told BuzzFeed, external. "We just liked the same things."
But, because of finances and practicalities, the four guys never found the opportunity to meet up in real life - until last weekend, when Charles and his fiancée Myra got married.
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Charles invited his three online pals to the wedding, and they all made the commitment to come. "Every part of my life they were there," Charles said about why is was so important they attend.
"It’s weird. They are all like brothers to me," Charles wrote of their relationship in a follow-up tweet, external. "We fight. We argue. We block and mute each other, but at the end of the day we spent half our lives chatting together."
He even asked one of the guys, Joe Morris, to be a groomsman at the ceremony. When they finally met in person, Charles shared a picture of the two of them on Twitter - and it quickly went viral, clocking up over 45,000 retweets, and 162,000 likes.
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Charles also shared a snap of him and the three lads with their respective partners.
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Charles Powell (right) with online gamer friends Joe Walters, William Brown and Joe Morris (L-R)
What's more, the online friend group had added two more members, external throughout the years, and they made it to the wedding too.
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We've reached out to Charles for an update on what plans the guys may have to keep in touch - in person - in the future, so we'll update this story as and when we hear from him.
Of course, we all have to be careful when arranging to meet people in real life that we first encountered on the internet - but as these guys' story shows, sometimes "online friends are real friends".
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