A Renaissance of Love
The story was broken yesterday at Manolo for the Big Girl, but a regular Manolosphere commenter, Andrea S, had a Very Special Experience at the Renaissance Faire. Follow the link, and wish her joy!
Interestingly enough, the Renaissance Faire was where Mr. Twistie and I met. I didn’t pay too much attention that first day to the somewhat less than sober guy holding up a pole at the Pistolbows (hand-held crossbows for the kiddies to shoot) booth, so I had no idea what a momentous occasion it was. Just shy of thirteen years later, we pledged ourselves to one another before a crowd of friends and family.
Yeah, sometimes we’re slow. Still, we get there eventually.
Oddly enough, my brother the alpaca rancher also met his love at the Faire. In fact, they met when she (a member of the Irish camp) proposed to him, because he looked a prosperous English fellow. It took them something in the range of about two years to tie the knot, but they fell hard pretty much immediately, and are still besotted with one another more than twenty years later.
Now I’m curious. When and where did you meet your intended/spouse? Did you know right away, or did it take a while? What’s your love story?
My husband and I met in the airport in Casablanca, Morocco. We were both studying abroad (at the same university as luck would have it!) for a semester. We hit it off immediately and started dating about 3 weeks into the program. Then we did the long distance thing for 2 years while we both finished up our undergraduate degrees at our respective institutions (University of Utah for me, The George Washington University for him). He moved to Salt Lake City after we graduated and we got married the following year.
All that said, it definitely took him a while to admit that we were dating. Everyone else in the program assumed it, all the native students assumed it (the university was really small <1,000 students) but he refused to admit that we were “exclusive” for about 3 months. Boys are so weird sometimes.
My fiance and I met through a mutual friend at a basketball game — that night, he e-mailed our friend to find out if I was single, and then he asked me out. He won me over right away by suggesting that we see the new Jane Austen movie together! (Unfortunately I’d already seen it with my friends, but it was the thought that charmed me.)
Casa, I was just in the Casablanca airport. I can see why there would be plenty of opportunities to meet someone there — the lines are a bit long, aren’t they?
My husband and I met at our 20-year college reunion. He walked into the Friday night party with his best friend from college, Pete, who was a casual friend of mine. I waved to Pete and his wife and Chris waved back. I’d never met Chris, so felt compelled to inform him that I was waving at Pete and Julie, not at him.
The next day, I realized (yes, I am slow) that I had been horribly rude, so sought Chris out at the Saturday supper and apologized. My ice cream melted at my table as we fell into conversation. He emailed Pete that Monday to get my stats and we began our Milwaukee-Memphis romance that culminated with my moving to Milwaukee last spring. I must really love him, because I moved to a place where it snows IN NOVEMBER.
The Beard and I met at a party thrown by some mutual friends. We were both convinced that the other was standoffish, but the fact that we never talked was a fact of “party geography” more than anything else. He thought I was stuck up…I thought he was deliberately avoiding me! It took more than half a year before we actually got together, though we saw each other at some parties thereafter. It was better that way, he’d just gotten out of a relationship, and I was digging being a single girl.
I think it took us both a while to decide that it was right. We both come from weirdly designed families with lots of divorce. I am a drive, type-A sort while The Beard is definitely a chill, take-life-as-it-comes kind of guy. We clashed a bunch over that
In the end, though, we realized that together we are a force to be reckoned with and better as a couple than we ever were apart.
Much like class-factotum, I must really love The Beard, because here I am living in what to me feels like a freezer for the majority of the year. If we’d never met, I’d be living in Florida…or maybe Costa Rica right now!
The Norwegian and I met in a very mundane government office at a military base in Western Tennessee. He had been working there a few months already and it was my first day of work (16 October 2006). He walked into my cubicle and sat down and began to explain the stack of paperwork I was about to embark upon. I don’t know what it was about him, but I was hooked immediately. We were both in relationships at the time, but still, meeting him was like being hit with the giant spiritual 2 x 4. I knew it was a special meeting. We started dating more than a year later, and we got married six weeks ago. We’re just plain happy and every single day is wonderful.
I love these stories! As a life-long dewy-eyed romantic, they make me smile. Keep ‘em coming, folks!
The first words my SO ever said to me were, “Can I help you?” which is in-the-office-speak for, “Who the (expletive) are you and why the (expletive) are you in my office?” See, I was walking thru the halls and I noticed a Washington Capitals logo on her monitor as I passed. I walked back into her office to make sure I wasn’t seeing things; the screen saver had moved onto the next picture. As I emerged she said those words to me and I stammered out an explanation of some sort. Turns out she’d been watching Caps games since she was five; her parents have had season tix for all but two or three years. In fact, stopping by her office for a recap of the game the night before became something I’d regularly do.
We became good friends and we now live together. We’ve discussed marriage but it is not in our immediate future; she was married once before and the experience soured her a bit on it.
Chris and I did our senior Electrical Engineering project together in college. We met in Microprocessors class. He built the thing, I programmed it, and the rest is history.
We had both just gotten out of long-term-relationships (me, two years, him, four years) and I was planning on moving to go to grad school in the fall. Therefore, we kept insisting that neither of us were ready for a serious relationship, and that it was just a rebound thing for both of us. After six months of dating, we were talking marriage, and we got engaged at the one-year mark. I think we were protesting a bit too much.
We met in a cave eating Fondue (yes we are both Swiss). We studied together and a colleague was organizing his birthday party in a cave. I am not what you will call physically fearless, since I am not very physically coordinated. And there was this guy who instead of playing macho could confess that he didn’t like to jump down from 2m too. We helped each other across narrow ledges and tight spaces. We did some cave holidays with the same people, we did go to the movies with the same people, but for me he was just a buddy. Then he got me to go out to the cinema with him alone, nobody else wanted to see Star Trek Nemesis. All went well, he was still my buddy. Then he got me to go and watch 4 weddings and a funeral, which is quite a feat, because I don’t like anything romantic like. I only agreed to Titanic, because of the CGI water and I was probably the only woman in the audience happy to see the Leo diCaprio character die. In 4 weddings and a funeral he had to collect me from under the seat, I was laughing so hard. I am a chaotic, do I have to say more ? And then he confessed his dark plans
, he asked to kiss me. And since he has this amazing, big, round baby blue eyes, I said yes. That was 13 years ago. We still hang on to cross the narrow ledges together.
Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your well wishes and kind words. I can’t even tell you how excited I was to see that you guys had posted up about Sonny’s (the groom-to-be) proposal to me – he deserves mad props for a breathtaking proposal that caught me completely by surprise. (Yes, I am apparently a blind fool, but certainly a happy one!).
I so appreciate you posting this up – you guys are the best. Thanks for an amazing blog that always keeps me laughing and smiling. THANK YOU!
My FI and I met at a club , the same night i was tell my girls “you don’t go to Club ****** to meet a decent guy!” I’m glad to be wrong! On the second date I knew that any guy that could put up with an ADD like me was well worth holding onto!!