Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
QOTD: Bonding Over Birthday Cakes or Other Shared Experiences
Early on, when my wife and I were dating, we went to the grocery store, and I told her that sometimes I just buy birthday cakes, and I eat them. And she said: ‘Really? I do, too.’ –Tom Cotton
I couldn’t help but chuckle over this comment by the dignified and reserved Senator Tom Cotton. It was good to see that he could see the silly and sweet parts of courtship.
When I first met my husband, my experience was quite the opposite from the Cottons, who connected on such a delicious (pun intended) level: my husband was this intense, skinny guy who drove a corvette and liked to ride motorcycles. We were two people, it seemed, who couldn’t be more different.
We were set up on a blind date, and he seemed pleasant enough, but when I didn’t hear from him after a few weeks, I frankly forgot about him. So when he called me again, introducing himself only as “Jerry,” I wracked my brain to figure out who he was. He explained that he hadn’t called because he had been rebuilding his motorcycle for several weeks and had also gone on a vacation. Right.
But we went out again. And every time we dated, it seemed we were jinxed. The first date he was late because a cousin stopped by his home with car trouble; the second time he was late because he flooded his corvette engine (something about a burr); the next time he was stopped by a cop who wanted to check to see if his motorcycle’s springer front end was the legal length. Then we got caught in L.A. traffic on our way to a play (which made us both late). And then there was a time when we went out on a jetty at Newport Beach and were doused by a rogue wave. (At least we kept our footing!)
So you can see why I had my doubts about where the relationship would go. But I did like him. We shared similar values and outlooks on life. He made me laugh. And he was clearly very smart. (I’ve always been a sucker for smart guys.)
We were engaged after dating for a year, and married the following year.
We’ll be married 46 years in July.
And he still makes me laugh.
What clicked between you and your spouse when you first met?
Published in Group Writing
I thought Corvettes were made in Kentucky, not Scotland.
This is the Quote of the Day. It can be the easiest way to start a conversation in the Ricosphere. We even supply links to find quotes if you don’t have one ready. You can sign up here for May 31st, since that’s the only date left this month.
Cute and clever!
Mrs Rodin and I were also introduced on a blind date. It wasn’t completely blind. The person who put us together was my cousin and a school classmate of Mrs Rodin’s. I was visiting my cousin the Thanksgiving before our eventual blind date and my cousin needed to stop by Mrs Rodin’s condo to feed the cat while Mrs Rodin was home visiting her parents. So I got a look into her “crib” and could tell that this person had things together. So I knew that about her before I met her.
In our case, I worked with a woman who dated a man that Jerry worked with. Funny how those things can work out!
My wife and I met at a pig pickin’ in our neighborhood. Other than her appreciation for anchovies, liver, and escargot, our food tastes pretty much line up.
Here’s what I wrote on this topic some years ago…
It was the year of the First Gulf War. I had spent the first half of the year in Israel, taking courses at Hebrew University and singing in choirs and musicals (Fiddler on the Roof in Hebrew was fun). All in all, a welcome and eye-opening break after my first year at college.
When it looked like Israel was going to drawn into the war with Saddam Hussein, I, along with everyone else in the country, was issued a gas mask. That helped focus the mind. And I realized that, even if it felt like desertion, I really had nothing constructive to contribute to Israel in wartime. My parents suggested that I high-tail it back home for the rest of the year. So I did – abandoning most of my possessions in the minutes I had to get to the airport for what was billed as one of the last flights out.
It was odd coming back and watching CNN, and hearing from my lunatic friends how much cooler it was to watch dueling Scuds and Patriots from the roof of their building instead of the bomb shelter. On top of that, things just felt wrong back at home: late teens are transitional years, and I was unsettled to my core.
Which might explain why, when my sister called from Barnard to introduce me to a friend of hers, the introduction was certainly intriguing. I knew nothing whatsoever about the girl, except her name and number, and my sister’s suggestion that we talk.
I am a pretty confident person; I have never found insecurity to be a helpful or constructive attribute, so I don’t bother with it. And this meant, in part, that I am not easily intimidated – by men.
But women? They scared me silly. I have one sister, but she is both my sister and a mathematician, so I did not consider her representative of the fairer sex. So anything and everything I now know about women has come the hard way – through study. My instincts were no guide at all. More than that, it did not occur to me that sometimes people communicate by not saying things. Which meant that I really had no idea what I was doing.
But fools rush in, and after a sustained assault by militant butterflies (and prompts by my fed-up father), I called the girl. No answer. Rinse and repeat. So I left a message. I read, to her answering machine, the James Thurber story, “The Shore and the Sea.” (you can read it here – it is a keeper). “MORAL: All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.” I am quite good at drama, so I read with gusto: voices, sound effects, etc.
And then, one afternoon when I was in a snowy and cold Winnipeg, an honest-to-goodness living and breathing girl answered the phone. (Thanks to a Dresser in Shining Armor, she had broken her toe, and was actually in her dorm room when I called.)
The conversation? It was awkward. First of all, she found the Thurber story very bizarre and potentially even dangerous. What kind of a person, sight unseen, reads a story into an answering machine? What was I trying to say, exactly?
We did not have a great deal in common, and, as I mentioned, I really had no idea how to communicate with a girl. It helped somewhat that there were no non-verbal cues – one advantage of the telephone is that it forces both parties to use the same medium. I remember saying some pretty stupid things, and I have to admit, her responses absolutely floored me.
This girl had guts. She could take it, and she could dish it, and I kept being surprised by her willingness to argue about just about anything. Challenging!
She was coming out to Oregon for my sister’s wedding, so we knew we would meet then, just a few weeks away. In the meantime, we spoke on the phone, quite a lot. This worked very well – we realized that in the year before I went to Israel, we must have been in the same room at Columbia/Barnard any number of times, but due to my instinctive fear of crowds (and her instinctive delight in them), if we had been introduced in person, there was no chance we would have even had a conversation. We were, despite religious commonality, worlds away in almost every other respect. Think Katherine Hepburn meets the Unabomber.
But we talked, and talked. As the big day approached, the anticipation grew. Well: I knew that I was excited, but I was still having a hard time with the notion that she might also be seriously interested in me. I had seen pictures, and this girl was Out. Of. My. League. But if she was none the wiser, I was not eager to break the news to her.
The whole group was coming in, and I was going to pick them up at the airport. That day, as John Kerry would say, is seared into my memory. I dressed in what I (poorly) judged was my best shirt. Flowers in hand, I waited to meet the girl with whom I had fallen in love.
And she was there! Coming out of the pack… taller, more stunning, and more lovely and poised than I had possibly imagined. I acted decisively. Panicking, I shoved the flowers into her hand, mumbled “this is for you,” turned on my heel, and fled.
To her credit, she was not willing to accept that sort of nonsense. It took some time to sort out.
Less than four days later, after she was good and tired and sure to have cloudy judgment, I proposed and she accepted. Neither of us really had any idea what we were doing – how could we? We were both 19 years old.
I thank G-d every day for all of it.
Thank you so much for sharing this story again!! I love it! And Mrs. iwe is still a stunner. You are a very lucky man. Oh, and of course, she is a very lucky woman. ;-) Thanks, @iwe
I am laughing so hard.
I like every word of that.
My mother and her mother knew each other through a common friend from college and were both in Garden Club together. The summer I was 17, her older brother and I worked cutting grass together. (We took out the passenger seat in my car and put a mower in there along with another on a rack I built for the roof.
After mowing all day, we would go get ice cream together and she could come if she was quiet – with the mowers removed.
After a while, we would leave her brother at home. Basically, we have been dating, engaged or married since she was 15 years old. The good news for me is that there is virtually nothing I can remember that wasn’t with her.
When I started college at UNC, she finished High School in Maryland. Eventually, I transferred to GWU (in DC), but she started Queens College in NC. Because of this, we spent lot of time apart in the beginning. I think that is why we enjoy each other’s company so much now.
A sweet story, @willowspring. For some reason, the bolded sentence has really touched me; it sounds like she was woven into your life in a beautiful way.
Well, it took a while with a few side trips. Tomorrow is our 54th anniversary. My wife and I both arrived in Washington D.C. in May of 1959. We both took residence in the northwest part of the city and both worked on F Street downtown. I worked in a commercial bank and she worked in a women’s retail store. That meant that we both regularly rode the Mount Pleasant streetcar line to go back and forth to work for two plus years before I was drafted into the military. We didn’t meet until September, 1963 when I returned from military service and went back to work at the bank but as manager of the night proof department. She had taken a job there and worked on the dayshift as a proof machine operator and we had a short overlap in work schedules so I met her as a co-worker at that point.
A few months later I left that bank and went to work at a bank in Silver Spring, Maryland and I moved to Maryland to live and work. Later in 1964, a fellow who had been a co-manager with me at the former bank, at my behest joined me at the new bank. I was managing the bookkeeping department and he was managing the proof department and we shared an apartment. This is now the mid-sixties in a big metro area where single women outnumber single men by maybe 3 to 1. What a place to experience the beginning of the feminist and free love movement. There were many opportunities for relationships and I took advantage.
Meanwhile, my future wife had gone back to her native Lima, Peru and my roommate just happened to be dating her cousin. After almost a year away, my future wife returned, was looking for work, her cousin asked my roommate, who knew my future wife from the previous bank, if he had a job for her. He didn’t but knowing that he would soon induced me to hire her in bookkeeping and sure enough soon he had an opening and she went to work for him.
I continued my unseemly and unhealthy escapades with women along with my smoking and drinking. We used to have big parties at our apartment. In December 1965, we had a Christmas party where his date brought my future wife and she and I had our first social relationship. The next morning I woke with my usual hangover but something was different. I called her and asked her out. She was different from my past experiences. I think then there was an intervention from above. I don’t know what she saw in me but she must have figured she could fix it because she’s good at fixing things. We were married May 20, 1966. We have 3 children, 7 grandchildren, 1 great-grandchild and one on the way. She saved my life.
We met at a party where I tricked them into changing venues so they couldn’t keep giving me alcohol (my ID was at home). He said that’s when he wanted to get to know me better.
He fell in love when I ditched him to lead a World of Warcraft raid.
We started dating soon after that and were married by the end of the year. It’s still a short story compared to some of your’s. We have more conflict plots to get through.
Happy lightly premature anniversary!
Oh, my gosh! What a lovely thing to say, @bobthompson! I’m so glad you found each other!
Um, could you explain this, Stina? What is a World of Warcraft raid–and how did that get him to fall in love with you? Sounds intriguing!
It’s a video game played by a great many other people at the same time and one of the things you could do was cooperate with large groups to accomplish something like wars or dungeon explorations together. The effort required someone leading 20-people groups. I was in charge of one such group.
My husband was a not so closet nerd, trying to hide it from most people.
Back then, I was cute and fit and my leaving him for a raid meant I was a nerd, too… which meant I was cute and someone he could be himself around. Win.
Perfect! Thanks for explaining!
Happy Anniversary, SQ :)
And there’s more. Some of it by way of explaining why I said the above. I have a cousin, now in heaven, who analyzed my seven years in the wilderness and my sudden salvation with help from above as stemming from my own dysfunctional family history followed by seven years of trying to figure out what the h*** was going on in a rapidly changing society. During that time I had been told by two people close to me what a bad person I was. She said I finally met a woman with family values that I could accept. That’s probably close because our relationship is not one of those often described as ‘soul mates’. We are absolute opposites according to Meyers-Briggs. Very few things we do together unless it connects to family and/or household.
I didn’t know for decades that she had to return an engagement ring when she started dating me. I had quit my college education after two years in 1959 and had not continued until we were married. Then I had to do it while working full time since we were making those 3 babies. My wife inspired (maybe I should say insisted) and supported me to get AB and MS degrees from George Washington U. and Georgetown U.
So there, I’ve had a full life and no regrets. I don’t look back.
Intriguing post, Susan, because almost everyone has that terribly important first meeting, a meeting that led to a lifetime together. I was attending the first dance of the year, the Hello Dance, at the University of Oregon. That was a rare thing for me. I generally didn’t like dances because I was a bit scared of girls. At any rate, I saw a group of four girls across the floor, and I walked up to them, hoping they would look up. Only Marie looked up. So I asked her to dance. We’ve been married for 57 years now. I suppose if another girl had looked up, I would have married her.
I don’t know — I think you two were meant for each other!
LOL My wife and I used to play Everquest, even our daughters! WOW is a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game. A raid consists of dozens, if not over a hundred players grouped together to defeat some really bad monster (or group of really bad monsters).
Great post, Susan. You and Jerry were lucky to find each other. I’ve seen you together, so I know. Here’s to the next 46 for the two of you!
PS: I buy birthday cakes sometimes too. They taste good and they’re pretty.
From what I’ve read about Katherine Hepburn, the Unabomber would have been at a decided disadvantage.
As was @iwe.
Mrs. Tabby’s first thought about me: He’s nuts. He’s out in sub-freezing weather without a coat.
My first attraction to Mrs. Tabby: She likes working with children at church. She’s probably a stable, loving person.
We were both on a between-Christmas-and-New-Year’s ski trip with my church college group. She was not a member of my church, but was accompanying a friend of hers who was coming to help recover from an unpleasant end to a romance. I was driving one of the vans in a caravan, and my van ran out of gas. I quickly jumped into the van following mine to go to the gas station for some gas. The only empty seat in that following van was next to Mrs. Tabby. I don’t like to wear heavy clothing while driving, so I was not wearing a coat. I wanted to get the whole gas thing done as quickly as possible, so I didn’t bother with putting on my coat as I dashed out of my van into the following van, leading Mrs. Tabby to think I regularly ran around without proper clothing. She has subsequently learned that I am a cold weather wimp, and am quick to put on a coat when outside in the cold. Apparently that I ran out of gas in the first place wasn’t the primary indicator of my unsuitability.
Although we were on a “ski” trip, neither of us skied. I shuttled the others to and from the ski slopes in the van, and so she and I (and a few others, including my mother who was along as a cook) hung out at the church at which we were staying. One of the things I learned while hanging out was that Mrs. Tabby taught children’s Sunday School and really liked the children. I figured a girl who liked teaching children’s Sunday School would likely be a good mother (yes, it really did occur to me that one of my criteria for dating material and ultimately wife material was whether she’d be a good mother for the children I wanted). By regularly donning a coat before going outside I was able to overcome the initial deficit in my observed sanity.
The much later clincher was that she was liked by my mother, my father, my brother, and several friends who had known me for a long time. Those who knew me best were quicker to see the compatibility than I was. And her family liked me and having me hang around their house. Though most of our courtship was at a distance, as I was away at law school. During my absences my family and her family got together without me.
I knew how likely those “rogue” waves were at the jetty at Newport Beach, as I went to high school in Newport Beach (Corona del Mar H.S., 1974). So I never took Mrs. Tabby out onto it. We did enjoy lots of walks along the waterfront and beachfront sidewalks though.
What a wonderful story!! You know it’s good when the families get together without you! Thanks, FST!
Well, we were both stupid. What’s funny is that when we saw the wave coming, Jerry jumped onto the jetty and I just lifted propped myself up with my arms. He ended up getting completely drenched; I was wearing long short and only got my legs wet! Served him right! Actually in later year we loved walking at Dana Point Harbor. Saturday or Sunday mornings, quiet and breakfast at Proud Mary’s. Loved it.