warmdarkwoman:Did you and hubby like each other when you first met, or was it a more gradual warming?
Do you remember exactly when you met?
Time for our tried and true "how you met and fell in love story."
I'm a girl from New Jersey (born in Manhattan, but raised in the Jersey suburbs) and he's a boy from the Bronx.
We met in San Francisco in 1988, because we were both in 12-Step recovery programs. There was a meeting space (long gone) at 90 9th St. Hubby (to be) was running the AA Meeting at 7PM on Fridays and I had the NA meeting in the same space a 830PM, so we used to see each other coming and going and setting up coffee and stuff.
One day he happened to spot me heading home with my groceries in the BART station. (He was hanging out with a BART gal he was trying to date.) He realized he didn't have a speaker for his meeting that Friday and asked me to speak.
I had just gotten my first ever set of business cards from new-ish job, my 2nd travel job in San Francisco. I was VERY EXCITED about these cards, and during the break in the meeting I handed one to hubby (to be) and told him to give me a call. I told him he should call me if he wanted to get together for "coffee or tea or something." He asked if I was serious and I told him I thought he was kind of cute. He said he thought I was kind of cute too. (Nora Ephron quality banter, it was not.)
The first date consisted of him cooking stir-fry for me, and us talking and talking and talking and a little bit of kissing. We must have both enjoyed it, because as he walked me home, we talked about possibly moving in together, which I mentioned to my actual roommate when I got home. That freaked her out so much, she ended up throwing me out shortly thereafer, which led to my moving into the same residential hotel that hubby (to be) was living in. I had my own room, but we were pretty much living together and have been together from that time on.
I'm not sure there was a "lightning strike" of love, but we definitely went through the giddy, telling each other all our deep dark secrets, and wanting to be together, joined at the hip, phase for a very long time, to the point that we were nauseatingly cute.
This whole retrospective makes it look like we were "fated to be mated, spotted to be knotted" and that it was always peaches and
None of this was exactly as easy as it sounds. There were issues. For one thing, I was a NUT JOB. For him to fall in love with me had to take an act of will and belief that I was worth the craziness. Lots and lots of craziness.
I honestly never thought I would fall in love and get married and still be married 20 years later. So the fact that I did and I am still has a slightly unreal quality about it all these years later...just as I sort of don't believe how old I am, because I never thought I would be this old.