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Valentine’s Week: The Love You Found or Hope to Find
Love is in the air this week. Tell us how you met your love, how he or she makes you better and what keeps your love alive. Or tell us what sort of love you are searching for. I just spent the morning singing through love songs from Broadway musicals, so I’m in the mood to hear what kind of fool you are.
When I met my husband, I wasn’t looking for love, except in the way every 17-year-old is. I spent the summer before my senior year in high school with my aunt and uncle in Washington, DC. That was eye-opening for a girl from Idaho. I loved the monuments, museums and history and — since I was a new face in a new place — enjoyed some male attention. One especially memorable instance involved a busload of soldiers passing by and breaking into waves and whistles at the sight of a pretty blonde. I was not offended. I got a lot of dates that summer and thought it was great.
While I was away, my Mom rustled up my first job at the mom & pop drug store near our house. It was an old-fashioned place with a soda fountain and a mini post office. After school started, one day at work there was a new employee, a tall, good-looking young man who — it turned out — was the bosses’ son, Steve. He was four years older than I and had just returned from a mission to Brazil, too late to go back to the university that semester. We were introduced at the soda fountain by his dad, who said that I went to the rival high school. Steve joked that he wouldn’t hold it against me.
Back then people actually dated. Boys asked girls on dates and paid, unless it was a Sadie Hawkins dance or some such thing. So we dated a little bit and then he returned to school. Back then, you could date casually, I think in part because dating was not assumed to involve sex. So we dated each other and other people for three years. Steve would get serious sometimes and suggest that we date exclusively (still no sex assumed), and I’d say that I thought that was like being engaged when you weren’t really engaged, which didn’t make sense to me, especially since we didn’t go to the same university. I didn’t want to date exclusively because, hey — fun with other guys — but I wanted to keep him in the orbit. He was kind and intelligent and wrote me poetry and sent me flowers. He made me feel special.
One day during the summer when we were both home from school, I was at my friend Pat’s house. Steve was going to pick me up there for a date. Pat’s brother was home and had just gotten engaged. A year or so before she, had set me up on a very bad blind date with this brother, and I could tell that he was not pleased to have me in the house on the happy day of his engagement. When Steve arrived and I saw him through the window I was so relieved and delighted to see him that it suddenly hit me that I might be in love and that here was someone I could always trust with my love. We didn’t get engaged for another six months or so, but that was the epiphany. Since then, we’ve always looked forward together and supported one another. My favorite manly virtue is the kind of clear-eyed intelligence that he possesses in abundance, along with being patient and slow to anger.
And he’s a great Dad. When I was a frazzled new mom with a one-month-old baby and wondering how I’d get through the next 18 years, I walked into the bedroom one day to find him sitting on the bed talking to our son, who was gooing back and then broke into his first smile. It was the moment when I started to love being a parent, and I learned it from Steve. After that though, I made sure that I always got the first smile. Now, after 39 years, we have many memories together, good and bad, but mostly good, and we have a rich set of inside jokes. I was young and stupid on that long ago day when he picked me up at Pat’s house, but I’m so grateful that I was smart enough recognize the man who would appreciate, value and return the love I gave to him.
I enjoy piecing together your personalities and stories Ricochetti, so tell us how you found love, or how you hope to find it.
Published in General
I’m not sure I got across the cultural difference that struck me. Sounds like Merina and her husband found each other and liked each other a lot but kept dating other people until they decided to marry. My parents were the same way.
In the dating scene I knew, it seemed like if you found somebody and you really liked each other you did not risk losing them by continuing to date around. You just saw each other till one of you got sick of it, or you got married! Dating seems similar today, though I hear horror stories of hookup culture I don’t see it myself (not that I would.)
The only winning move is not to play.
I’d just like everyone to note what a total cliche my parents were, meeting there at the soda fountain and all. As a teenager I speculated on whether that could just be a story to cover up some steamy truth they didn’t want to tell us. Because it does *sound* like the sort of thing you’d make up, right? But no, I think they actually did just meet there working the soda fountain at the drug store.
I first saw the woman I would marry in church. She was the most elegant and beautiful woman I had seen in eons. I was drawn to her. It was like I was lit up from the inside, and she made my eyes happy.
When I went to introduce myself after Mass, I then saw a little boy with his arms around her calf muscle and realized that she was married to the choir director, so I turned around and left.
Later I heard that her husband died of lung cancer, but did not act on it.
My friend, who managed a fabric story hired the widow, and they befriended one another.
At some point in time, the suggestion came to me that I should take this woman out on a double date, so we did, with dinner and a movie. After dinner we separated from my friend and her husband. There was a gap between the end of the dinner and the movie so we went for a ride.
I had an MG convertible with the top down and I decided to wrap her in my coat because it was a bit chilly and she should not be cold. If one of us was to be cold, it could not be her.
By the time the evening was done, I wasn’t interested in her but thought she needed a bit of a push to move from widowhood to dating, so I asked her out again. She could not go on the first day I mentioned, then she could not go out on the second day I noted, so I was thinking I would get out of this safely, without hurting her feelings, but giving her a bit of appreciation of her self and her self-confidence for whatever was coming up. I did offer a third day and she said yes, so I was committed to that second date.
We drove to San Francisco, shared cheese fondue, and drove back down 280 to San Jose. On the way we stopped at some roadside look out and we kissed.
I never looked back. We have six children, 11 grandchildren, and one great grandchild. We’ve been through thick and thin with one another, but never in contention with one another. In the darkest days she carried me and kept me together.
At a Catholic wedding three people are joined, Jesus, the bride, and the groom. His grace and her gifts have made things work for us. And, she still makes my eyes happy.
Jojo, it may not have been the case if I hadn’t been so young. Since I was only 17 when we met and still in high school, I just wasn’t ready to get married. If I’d been older, I would have probably been smart enough to know the good ones don’t stick around! My Mom really angered my Dad along these lines. She was 8 years younger than he, so not ready to marry when they met. She even told him that men are like street cars. If you don’t catch this one, you can catch the next one that comes along. This did not set well with him but she was the girl he wanted, so he stuck it out. Obviously I’m glad he’s the streetcar she caught.
And introduced to each other by Grandpa no less! It sounds impossibly sweet, but at least we weren’t sharing an ice cream soda. Right then anyway.
My husband and I managed to be the same way, too.
Actually, my husband, a delightfully square guy, got the tip, “Date multiple women at once and let them know they’re not the only ones,” from the pickup artist community. And it worked!
It took a lot of the pressure off me, actually. First, it assured me he wasn’t a creep – if he had behaved badly with the other women, I’d find out about it, since I knew who they were. Secondly, it did successfully signal to me that he was maybe a more attractive guy than I had first thought. Thirdly, it took the sexual pressure off. If he were just after tail, he had other girls he could bother: he’d date me for me, not just because his crotch was lonely.
Uh huh.
That actually worked for me too. My wife and I had a rocky dating life, and by the senior year of college she was still somewhat unsure of me. Meanwhile I had been showing interest in a couple of other ladies, and when my wife overheard one of them talking about me and how she hoped to snag me, that rather clarified things.
Worked well! But I don’t think it works if anybody involved is having sex. (Is that the intent of the “pickup artist” community? Yecch. I’m not sure where that leads but not to happy marriages. And it’s mighty depressing to think any woman would participate in that.)
Delightfully square is just perfect and not easy to find.
Skip and some of his admirers:
When I married the first time, I thought I was marrying an artist: We met at college where Drew was studying photography. But God has a sense of humor: Drew became a state trooper and I was his “A-Unit” and the full-time, stay-at-home mother of our four little “B-units.”
He was a splendid man, devoted to his children and passionate about service. (Oh yeah, and handsome!) He was the one who had the idea of going to seminary, picking away at a Masters’ degree so that by the time he retired from the state police, he’d be ready for a second career as a minister. But then, at the age of 34, Drew was killed in the line of duty.
After he died, realizing that a minister was missing from the world along with that missing husband and father, I went to seminary and now serve Drew’s brothers and sisters as a law enforcement chaplain. I think of this as a love story. I hope it sounds like one?
Before you ask—I did, at last, remarry. My second husband is kind and lovely, devoted to his own kids and now mine as well. And (ironically, now that I think of it) he’s an artist!
Kate, it is a beautiful story of love and sacrifice.
I’m a geek, so of course I met my wife online.
That was 20+ years ago. “Online” was what we called a “BBS,” short for “bulletin-board system,” which is now only slightly less archaic.
We’d talk online for hours, then we moved to the phone. At one point she said she was hungry. Then she said she was tired and going to bed. “A classic avoidance reaction,” I said, teasing—paraphrasing a line from Michael Crichton’s “Sphere.” But this apparently intrigued her enough to go to Jerry’s Famous Deli (open late!) with me.
As I’ve written before, she’s an actress (yes, if you’re a woman our age, you’ve probably seen her) and her mother is a comedian. Her father is a published composer, painter, sculptor, general contractor (built the house he and my MIL live in), and fire captain.
She married me anyway.
I’ve given her reason to hate me; she’s forgiven me. I’ve taken the riskiest start-up jobs and lost those bets; she’s stuck around. We’ve made each other laugh until we’ve cried—mostly with each other, sometimes at each other. She’s a Jewish-convert-eh-atheist; I’m a poor Lutheran with both a mystical and harshly rationalist bent (do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself! I am large; I contain multitudes)! We can, and do, talk religion, politics (both libertarian), and science. She found the Tipler vs. Krauss debate at Caltech and bought the tickets. She earned us, through her work, time together in Austria, the Virgin Islands, on a Canadian cruise, and Tokyo. She’s brilliantly raised a young man—the most intelligent, moral, compassionate 26-year-old it is my honor to call my son.
I don’t know where I’d be—in any sense, literally or figuratively, physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually—without her. And by the grace of a loving God with an interesting sense of humor, she has not made it necessary to find out.
Okey dokey! Actually, I’ve posted on this before . . .
I met my wife at a pig-picking the contractor building our neighborhood threw for the residents. Yes, we here in the South are easily bribed by such things. I had seen her at a party at a neighbor’s house a couple of weeks earlier, but didn’t introduce myself because I thought she was the host’s girl friend. I didn’t know she was another person who had bought a house in the neighbor.
Anyway, I introduced myself at the pig-picking, and it took off from there! Now, I know my wife is going to read this, and her version might begin like this:
“I was at this BBQ, minding my own business, when this creep with BBQ sauce all over his shirt comes up to me, spills beer on my shoes, and asks me out.”
As for our daughters, I direct you to this post (wish I knew how to make it a link):
http://ricochet.com/national-adoption-month/
No, no, NO! The length of your post was necessary in order to tell that wonderful story!
Attention Ricochetti! This is a guy you wanna party with . . .
Bravo!
Stad, I’m glad your romance is as colloquial as mine. I had never heard the phrase “pig-picking”. It’s great.
Notice how our daughter was poking gentle fun at how ridiculously sweet and meet cute her (gleam in her father’s eye style) beginnings were?
I remember your post about adopting your daughters. It’s a wonderful story.
Thank you. Some really good stories here.
Mrs. Tabby (“R”) and I met on a Christmas break trip for students from my home church. I was a regular in the group. She was along as a friend of a friend, and thus did not know anyone else on the trip. Although the trip was nominally a ski trip, she and I were among the few who were not skiing, and so we got acquainted hanging around the church building in which the group was staying.
We had one date (ice skating) after the church trip before I returned to law school a thousand miles away. We wrote letters that semester and had telephone conversations on Sunday afternoons (long distance telephone was expensive in 1980, and Sunday rates were the cheapest). We started dating again when I returned “home” for the summer. One evening during that summer I had to cancel a date to our favorite restaurant so that I could replace the springs on my mother’s garage door (which had broken that morning). R wanted to come along and participate. That she would be willing to help my mother and me replace garage door springs and not be upset about having our date cancelled spoke volumes to me.
When I went back to school in the fall (one thousand miles away), my mother and my younger brother often went to visit R and her family. By late fall, my mother said that if I didn’t propose marriage to R, my mother would disown me, and adopt her. In addition, a female friend of mine who had known me since we were infants (gorgeous girl who I never had any interest in dating, and was forever trying to explain girls to me) said that if I didn’t marry R, I was a fool. So did several of my law school friends after she came up to visit me at school (during which visit she stayed at a motel a few blocks from my apartment).
I had expected that I would need to know a girl for years before deciding to marry. But, that so many people who knew me well, and in whom I was confident really had my best interests in mind saw R as the perfect mate for me, removed any concern I had about proposing to her after being physically with her a cumulative total of less than four months. So we were married on August 15, 1981, after I graduated from law school. My mother and my friends were right. She is the perfect mate for me.
OK Merina I guess my story is sufficiently gooey for this mush-fest you have running here.
In my junior year of high school I was a bit of a shutterbug. Taking pictures and processing them in the darkness of my bathroom with all of the knobs one could turn to make some really interesting images was fun, but not a sufficient outlet. This was “Photo Shopping” before the personal computer really existed. To give this creative itch more of a purpose I signed up for yearbook staff photographer as a senior course elective. Before the summer break prior to senior year class the staff had a bunch of preplanning meetings to discuss what we wanted to be the thematic objective for our class book. The future Mrs III was the editor.
As graduates during the year of our country’s bicentennial birthday, and as a school in the suburbs of the nation’s capital the theme became a no brainer. The yearbook editor wanted to do some shots in downtown DC during our summer break. We did a several photo runs that summer on our bikes, which gave us a lot of time to talk, and she was coming down from a failed relationship. We eventual became close friends our senior year becoming an “exclusive” couple by graduation. We were both going to go to college and it was easy for me to talk her into upgrading her plans of community college to attending the U of Maryland (back then the tuition differences was trivial) thus reducing our separation anxiety. We commuted together, studied together, worked on campus job’s together. (Are you all gagging yet?).
Our initial agreement was no marriage until we graduated, but I had a change in majors delaying my graduation by a year, but when she could see the end of the tunnel she wanted a date to tie the knot. Back then playing house and doing marital “test trials” was still a shamed option. We settled on the Fall of 1980 getting married in October in a small 100 person full mass ceremony with a few friends and family doing a lot of the prep ourselves with the reception in a meeting room at the aging Holiday Inn in College Park. She got a job in her major of accounting, but we were as a nation still in the grip of Carter’s malaise, so we lived for 8 months in the incomplete addition of my folks’ home until I graduated and got my first engineering job. One year in a dumpy apartment (but at least we had privacy!) saving and scrimping but thinking, why are we paying a landlord with no creation of equity for this hole?
This led to the quest for home ownership. Both being analytically oriented we developed “the requirements document”, garage, fireplace, NTE distance to work, and not in Prince Georges County (where we both grew up). Well what we could afford with a 20% down payment, and 16% interest rates made the final choice the ultimate fixer upper. The crushing payments and the continuing trips to the Home Depot of the day (anyone remember Hechinger’s) necessitated each of us taking evening jobs. Fortunately the owner of our college eating hang out was sympathetic and gave Mrs. III a job at the register, and I was in the back doing food preparation and dish washing four evenings a week. Weekends were reserved for restoration. This was the routine for four years. By the time we had finished the place I was tired of cleaning up the malfeasance I was finding behind every wall, with every electrical upgrade, window, door, appliance, replacement and new HVAC and insulation enhancements. Mrs III was there for every step, no shrinking violet to mudding walls, nailing hardwood floors, setting & cleaning tiles and deciding all décor.
We (and I mean we) went on to build our dream home, my brother in laws home and restored his mom’s home just to get to the point to start the family. We have two boys, now both in college in fields that have high employment probability.
I could go about the building travails we experienced as the general contractor and chief laborers which would test any marriage, but this should be sufficiently sappy for Rachel.
What with a pair of High School school sweet hearts engaged for five years through college and still married after 35 years. That should evoke her retching reflex. :)
Hey–I’m a girl and an historian. I make no apologies for instigating mush fests that involve primary sources and people’s histories! Besides, I needed to hear some uplifting stories right now. The news is, shall we say, not uplifting.
Doing a lot of the wedding prep yourself, I understand. But calling a 100-person wedding small?
Did wedding used to be very much larger back in the day, or do I just come from a weird social circle where 100 guests is more like the upper limit?
Interesting… In our culture back then you didn’t have a big meal or anything, just a reception at the church and the whole dang community came. We are both from the same town so we had hundreds at our reception, but not all at once. They’d sort of filter through, make their way down the receiving line, sit down and have some cookies and punch, leave a small gift and go home. 100 does sound like a small wedding to me. Times have changed I guess.
Midge
We are Catholic, 75 were family. Parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins , 8 were wedding party, 15 or so were friends…. Which relatives do you tell to not come?. She & I were the eldest on both sides so the marriage novelty was still fresh for this generation getting married. The entire budget was ~$2000. Still sounds large?
None of them were asked not to come. Most of the distant relatives didn’t want to come, though. And I guess my immediate family isn’t very big.
Well, not expensive as weddings go. Nominally, I think that’s about what we spent, though there’s been considerable inflation since 1980. I’m a big fan of cheap weddings. I think people have more fun at cheap weddings, because they’re more relaxed. The biggest expense for us was the church space and the organist’s fee.
My wife and I met on a blind date. A friend was staying with my family for the summer and he wanted to go out with his fiance. He asked me if I’d double date with him (because he wanted me to borrow my parent’s car in place of the ratty borrowed one he had for the summer), but the girl I had been dating was out of town. I joked that if he could set me up with a girl, I’d be glad to go. He responded that his fiance had a younger sister my age and he’d see if she could convince her sister to go out with me. We had to go to his fiance’s father’s shop to work on his car that day, so I met my future in-laws before I met my wife because both her mother and father were at the shop. We then stopped at the store where his fiance was working to run the idea by her, so I also met my future sister-in-law before I met my wife.
It turned out that my sister-in-law-to-be had to practically threaten her younger sister to get her to agree to the date; the price of the agreement was loaning my wife-to-be a dress. That evening we piled into my mom’s VW bug (that this car was an improvement over my friend’s borrowed car – an Austin Healey Sprite – tells you something about its condition) and we went to a movie. I let everyone out at the entrance to the parking lot so they could get tickets and I parked the car. When I got out and walked toward the theater, there was my date waiting for me. Somehow that struck me as really gracious of her and I started to regard her more seriously.
Well, the first date went well, so I asked her out the next night to go to a Detroit Symphony concert. How she reacted to classical music would be an important test. She passed with flying colors. Shortly thereafter, I broke up with the girl I’d been dating and started “exclusively” dating my wife-to-be. [As some have noted, back in 1969, dating tended to be exclusive.]
As happened with The King Prawn, one thing led to another and we got pregnant. That’s a whole other story. But the short version is that we decided that we’d created life out of love and we were going to bring the child into the world, and to do that properly we should get married (despite the misgivings of some of our parents and relatives). It helped that we were young and in love – and we still are 45 years later – and that we didn’t have a realistic idea of the difficulties we would encounter. But, having accepted our decision, our families were incredibly supportive and helped us through the tough financial times. And our daughter has now been married to a terrific guy for 20 years, and has blessed us with two fantastic grandchildren.
So, though I can’t say I’m strongly religious, I believe that it was God’s plan for me (or us) that we met, got pregnant, and got married. He undoubtedly knew that if that didn’t happen, I’d be too stupid to get married to the woman He’d picked out for me – and He had to save me from my own stupidity! Not a day goes by that I don’t thank Him for that! [And yes, my friend got married to his fiance (though we beat them to the altar) and they’ve been married almost 44 years now; in fact, we’re traveling to Austin, Texas, this weekend for a visit.]
You monster!
Pugshot, it’s funny how our mistakes lead to our blessings sometimes. I think there are a lot of people who would be similarly blessed if, when this happens currently, the first thought were not abortion, and the understanding that a coming child meant marriage were still in place. Yes, there would be some divorces, but I bet there would be more people grateful that God led them to the right person.