This is the story of how I met the man I call my husband (& in fact up through how we started dating). I don't assume that anyone cares, but we do get asked a lot. (After all, we were both homeschooled. How do homeschooled people even ever meet other human beings?) & the plot twists are fun.
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Our story begins when I was thirteen (2001). I had a friend named Sarah. Sarah was special to me because she lived less than three miles away from me. That was less than half as far as my best guy friend, not to mention like seven times closer than my best girl friend. (I could go on about how it's weird that we were ever friends, but I'll just leave it at 'being a kid is hard'.) Sarah was in 4H. She invited me to go with her to a bonfire/pitch-in/games thing that was somehow related to 4H. I said yes. (I then found out that a band I'd been SUPER interested in for MONTHS was going to be playing a concert in town the SAME DAY, & I was SUPER SAD. Except then I noticed that the concert was ACTUALLY the night BEFORE, so I got to go to BOTH, & IT CHANGED MY LIFE FOREVER.) So we get to the thing, & literally as soon as we get out of the car she runs off to hang out with her 4H buddies & leaves me in the literal dust. BUT I ROCKED IT. GOOD JOB, THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD ME. Very proud. I talked with a couple of nice girls, but mostly ended up hanging out with a boy & his sister. This boy happened to be named Jamie, & that moment struck me as Oh Snap, This Could Be The End of a Friendship, because I knew that Jamie was the boy that Sarah (--& all of the other girls, from what I understood) totally had a crush on. Oops. (No way was I going to tell her that he called me attractive. [Tip: 15-year-old boys shouldn't be calling anyone attractive anyway.])
But it never came up, it was totally cool.
If all you wanted to know was the literal answer to how we literally met the literal first time, you can literally stop reading now.
I was supposed to go with Sarah to a 4H-related Skating Party a few months later (ooooh, ahhhhh, might see that boy again), but she got grounded. Which really was the more End of a Friendship moment, because I was recognizing the pattern of her getting grounded when we were supposed to do things, + only calling me as a back-up when her other friends were busy anyway, + not really having much in common with me. So, there went my chances of ever seeing that boy again. & his sister was so nice too. A real shame.
*nearly three-year intermission*
2004 was an intense year for me. Lots of stuff happened. Most relevant to the story, I got my first job with a real paycheck & paying taxes & everything! It was just a temporary gig, one of many helping out in one department of many in one building of many at the Indiana State Fair. It was a great job though. I cleaned a lot of glass, told a lot of people where to find the nearest restroom, went up & down a lot of stairs. My coworkers included not only my mom, but a couple of guys & their mom. Oh, one of those guys was Jamie. Turns out his entire family is pretty great! & they thought I was pretty great! Jamie was pretty cool to hang out with most of the time, but he acted a bit weird. I couldn't tell if he liked me or not, much less remembered me or not. But he rambled on to me about violins, various interpretations of Revelations, Kings Island, & other stuff. Oh, & this one time, I was posted at the front door when he walked up through the rain completely drenched & miserable. That isn't relevant to anything, but I'll never forget it. There was also this one part where I caught myself staring at how handsome he looked in the hat he was wearing at the time. (But it's not like I had a crush on him. That'd be illogical.)
I hung out with his family a couple of times in following year, but life & stuff made things busy... add to which I hate making phone calls... add to which even though his family liked me, none of them in particular was attached enough to me to call me to hang out...
*insert going about life, doing many things, learning many things*
In the autumn of 2006, a website called Facebook, which had previously required a college-affiliated e-mail address in order to register, no longer required a college-affiliated e-mail address in order to register! That was fun for me since I didn't go to college but made a bunch of friends who lived in other states (via working at summer camps + hanging around a couple of internet forums, aw yeah).
*insert more life & more things & more learning*
In the autumn of 2007, Jamie's mom found me on facebook. Then his brother did. & then he did. & he sent me a message in which he said that he MISSED ME. Exact words: "really missed". + "we need to hang out sometime". Thus commenced much messaging, including planning for me to go with him & his mom (+ one of his sisters, & one of his coworkers) to a haunted house. So, when I saw him for the first time in over two years, he was wearing these black pants with an extravagant amount of metal-- spikes & buckles & chains & stuff! He looked like a total punk. He was just trying to get into the Halloween-y spirit, but it was NOT what I was expecting. I was also not expecting to feel metaphorically struck by lightning. It was super weird. It was like I saw him & something inside me said "guess what? you're going to marry that guy", & it felt like electric shock, & I spent the rest of the evening reminding myself quite insistently that I don't believe in that sort of thing. I figured maybe like one couple in a thousand can have a genuine love-at-first-sight kind of thing. My mom's cousin's husband says it was like that for him. (His wife didn't feel it. ;-)) Besides, he looked like a punk, & not at ALL the type of guy with whom I ever thought I'd end up romantically entangled. I was researching internships at the time, internships in entire other states, which would more than likely lead to jobs in entire other states. I had planned to settle my career before getting attracted to some guy. But noooooooo. Over the next couple of months he quickly earned his way to being my best friend, & with a lot (a LOT) of prayer (+ one of the clearest times I've ever "heard" God "speak" to me), I decided to say yes when he inevitably (he was ridiculously hopelessly falling for me) asked me to be his girlfriend. Which he did at around 2:20am on January 1st, 2008.
