((Part 5/5 #fridayintroductionsourlovestory )) (Hubby said I didn't have to bleep out his face in these photos!! 😱😱😱) Once I was home for the summer, he started calling and taking me out regularly. We went to the fair, the movies, out to eat, and he even asked if we could be an official couple, but I said no thank you (my Irish husband was waiting, after all. Also, the non-Catholic thing was an issue!). Then on June 10, he put his arm around me (the first “move” he’d made) and I instantly felt peace, pleasant surprise, and comfort; I felt at home. It was so powerful and so real, even in its simplicity, that I told him yes, I would be his girlfriend. Three weeks later I knew I was head-over-heels in love with this patient, kind, smart, hilarious (yes, he turned out to be hilarious, in a quiet, clever way) man who was only ever respectful about my faith (and even came to Mass with me frequently), and I wondered (very very impatiently, I might add) when he was going to propose. Also, that I didn’t know how I would live without him in Ireland. Not only that, but he would be studying in London in the spring. Thus began a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad (but also amazing in a lot of ways that had to do with friends and travel) year. We emailed as much as we could (in those days we had to stand in line for a turn at the computers), wrote actual letters (pages and pages), and had weekly phone calls (I waited at a lonely phone booth in the dark for the right time to call him when I was away, and languished in my dorm room waiting for his calls when he was away). We have never, ever taken for granted being in the same place at the same time; that year was so hard! He graduated right after he got home in May and started law school in the fall (because, as he’d told me on a phone call before we were even a couple, he wouldn’t be able to support a family as an archaeologist [which is what he really wanted to do]. WHAT. So many whats with this guy. So amazing), and I started my senior year in college. After all that came before, it was so nice to have a good, normal year as a dating couple. Next week: our engagement story! #mrandmrsnomina
((Part 4/5 #fridayintroductionsourlovestory )) It was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me, it was like a movie! The girls screamed, one of them grabbed the card and ran across campus with it to show my roommate, who’d been impatiently waiting for me to get back and had finally had to leave for class before finding out who the flowers were from. The worst part was, I still didn’t know who they were from! Weirdly, there were three guys I thought were possibilities (fortunately, one was baseball-hat boy). That night I was able to determine they weren’t from the other two, and when I saw him in class the next day he confirmed they were from him -- he felt like he’d given up too easily, and wanted to try again for a date before I went home for the summer. I admired his perseverance, and loved his grand gesture, so we did, finally, have our date -- dinner at the Olive Garden. I still wasn’t sure about him, so I thought I’d lay it all out there for him on this first date -- all the things that made other boys run away screaming. Like how I didn’t believe in sex before marriage (I started with that one! Once again, playing the coward; I thought he’d leave me alone after that and I wouldn’t have to have a hard conversation with him). He didn’t even flinch, just said, “Me either,” and continued eating. WHAT. I’d never heard such a thing from a boy before. I also discovered that, though he wasn’t Catholic, he had a deep, strong faith, and that we agreed on more than we disagreed on. He was nervous about how I wanted a bunch of kids (yes, I told him that too) but asked to see me again; I was surprised to find that I didn’t hate the date, and even agreed to continue seeing him over the summer, though I warned him that I was studying abroad in Ireland in the fall and therefore didn’t want a relationship, because I was going to meet my husband over there. 🙄 ((image: me with the roses in my dorm room)) #mrandmrsnomina
((Part 3 #fridayintroductionsourlovestory )) I'd just agreed to a date with someone I felt like I didn’t know (our fin de semana convos notwithstanding) and I'm sorry to say I really wasn’t terribly interested in knowing him better. The next few weeks were a weird nervous jumble of making plans and breaking plans (for good reasons, which I was, unfortunately, relieved about each time) and then he seemed to have cooled on the idea, which was fine by cowardly me who didn’t want to deal with looking at his disappointed face if I was honest with him. So then one Thursday -- April 23, 1998, to be exact -- I’d skipped classes (I had Spanish on MWF, so I wouldn’t have seen him that day anyway) to give an abstinence talk at a local high school, and I got back to my dorm around 1 or so -- I remember pulling open the door to my wing and seeing the squares of sunlight on the hallway floor in front of my friend KZ’s room, which meant she was there, which meant we’d go have lunch together. Before I’d fully walked into the hallway, her head poked out of the room and she saw me and yelled, “She’s back!!” All of a sudden girls were running out of their rooms toward my room, which was locked, encouraging me to open it up. Why? Why? I remember having a hard time getting the key in the lock because of the girls around me wanting to get in the room and because my hand was shaking. Inside, on my dresser, was a vase with a dozen roses -- half red, half yellow -- and a card with my name and room number on it. “Open it! Open it!” they were all yelling, because they didn’t know who the flowers were from; I opened it and the sender had written out Shakepeare's 98th sonnet and NO SIGNATURE. ((image: the actual roses and card🌹🌹🌹)) #mrandmrsnomina
((Part 2 #fridayintroductionsourlovestory )) One day (end of Feb? beginning of March?) we walked down the stairs from the classroom together, as we did after every class, because we started at the same place (desks next to each other in the classroom), and we walked together *along with all the other hundreds of students leaving that building at the end of that class period* -- what I’m trying to say is, walking out of the building with him after class never struck me as significant in any way, until that day when, instead of turning left together at the bottom of the stairs and then saying, “See you next class!” when we got to the library, where I would continue to my dorm and he would go into the library, I said, “I’m actually going this way today” (to the right, to meet with a professor) and he said, “Oh. Yeah, me too.” 😳😳😳 In that instant all those conversations and our side-by-side seats suddenly took on new meaning and I felt my stomach drop. When we reached my professor’s office, he shuffled his feet and stammered a little and asked if I’d like to go out sometime. I’d had 37 seconds to process what was happening since he told me he was going the same direction as me, so I said, “Sure!” because I didn’t know what else to say. He was so pleased and said goodbye and I ducked into the professor’s office and started panicking. ((image: me around the time of this story, with three of my closest friends -- they witnessed all this)) #mrandmrsnomina
