Why am I getting an OPTIONS request instead of a GET request?

According to MDN,

Preflighted requests

Unlike simple requests (discussed above), "preflighted" requests first send an HTTP OPTIONS request header to the resource on the other domain, in order to determine whether the actual request is safe to send. Cross-site requests are preflighted like this since they may have implications to user data. In particular, a request is preflighted if:

• It uses methods other than GET or POST. Also, if POST is used to send request data with a Content-Type other than application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain, e.g. if the POST request sends an XML payload to the server using application/xml or text/xml, then the request is preflighted.
• It sets custom headers in the request (e.g. the request uses a header such as X-PINGOTHER)

If you're trying to POST

Make sure to JSON.stringify your form data and send as text/plain.

<form id="my-form" onSubmit="return postMyFormData();">
    <input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Your Name" required>
    <input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Your Email" required>
    <input type="submit" value="Submit My Form">
</form>

---

function postMyFormData() {

    var formData = $('#my-form').serializeArray();
    formData = formData.reduce(function(obj, item) {
        obj[item.name] = item.value;
        return obj;
    }, {});
    formData = JSON.stringify(formData);

    $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url: "https://website.com/path",
        data: formData,
        success: function() { ... },
        dataType: "text",
        contentType : "text/plain"
    });
}

The OPTIONS is from http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/ See http://metajack.im/2010/01/19/crossdomain-ajax-for-xmpp-http-binding-made-easy/ for a bit more info