Leigh Kramer

This Is How We Met: Angela Mackey's Story

Since I used to work in the healthcare world, this story has a special place in my heart. Does anyone working in healthcare want to date a doctor?!

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We Weren't But God

My husband, Dan, claims I ignored him the first time we met. I don't remember that "meeting." I am pretty sure he is wrong, but he insists I ignored him during our first introduction.

I remember meeting my husband at a restaurant on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Several female friends and I went out to eat after church. Not long after we arrived a group of guys from our church showed up as well. Since the restaurant was crowded, the two groups decided to sit together. Dan was the last one to sit down and the only seat left was next to me.

As we introduced ourselves Dan mentioned he was a doctor.

A sly smile spread across my face, "I'm an ICU nurse."

That was the relationship death knell. No doctor wanted to marry an ICU nurse and no ICU nurse wanted to marry a doctor.

Surprisingly our conversation didn't stop there. We talked about the struggles we dealt with as new healthcare providers. Some of our friends started turning green as we shared unusual stories. Our conversation was deep and I don't remember saying much to anyone else.

Later that day I talked to my sister on the phone. I told her, "I met a nice guy, but he didn't ask for my number. I'll probably never see him again." Our church was huge and the singles group alone had thousands of attendees.

That evening I went to evening church with some girls from my Bible Study. Not long after I sat down, I noticed Dan filing into the pew behind me. I tell Dan it was God's way of saying, "You didn't get her phone number the first time, get it now."

Dan claims he didn't remember any of the sermon because he was too focused on me. After the service, he asked for my phone number. He says the cookies I gave him encouraged him. Let me explain. I brought cookies to a Bible study that met at the church just prior to Sunday evening service. I had tons of leftover cookies. Since I lived alone I didn't want store bought cookies in my apartment. So I offered the meager leftover cookies to Dan. I guess that offering was just the encouragement he needed to ask for my number.

Two weeks passed and he didn't bother to call me. I figured he wasn't interested, but he was studying for a test for his medical license. Once the test was completed, we saw each at church and he asked me out. About two years later we met each other at the altar – the doctor and the ICU nurse. God's ways are certainly not ours, but they are so much better.

Angela Mackey lives in the Arkansas River Valley with her wonderfully supportive husband and three amazing children. She is passionate about teaching women to renew their minds through God’s word so that they may live transformed lives. Angela is a writer, speaker, nurse, and stay-at-home mom who openly shares her struggle with infertility. She loves college basketball (especially the Kansas Jayhawks), reading, writing, and laughing at herself.

This Is How We Met: Alison Solove's Story

Did she ask out a guy who was too young or just right? Read on to see how Alison's story unfolded.

Want to submit your TIHWM story? Check out the guidelines here.

 

My husband Adam and I met the very first day of college… because I thought he was someone else!

On the hall of my freshman dorm lived a guy. Stefan. He was tall—really tall. His pronounced nose and distinctive accent marked him as clearly Eastern European. Not only was he a tall, dark, and handsome stranger, but he also played the bass guitar (like me!), stunt biked for fun (not like me at all, but awesome), and rode horses on a Colorado ranch every summer. What a guy, right?

That night, I saw a tall—really tall!—Eastern-European-looking guy standing outside on the street. I invited him to join me for dinner. Over sandwiches at a French bistro in Georgetown, I learned that he was a brilliant, well-read person and a man of faith. I thought I had found the perfect man.

Let me explain now that when you are only 5’ 3” you don’t look always crane your neck up to look at tall, dark, handsome strangers in the face. That’s why, as I found out later, my dinner date wasn’t Stefan at all!

I’d asked someone I had never met to dinner, something an old-fashioned, Southern girl like me should never, ever do. To make matters worse, it turned out that Adam was only five months older than my little sisters—and they were only high school sophomores! As far as I was concerned, we clearly weren’t meant to me.

Adam wasn’t so sure. Between the day we met, August 28, and the beginning of Christmas break, Adam asked me out at least once a week. That’s at least fifteen invitations to dinner at my favorite restaurants (which he researched), shows at the Kennedy Center, and homemade meals in the dingy dorm kitchen. And at least fifteen times I turned him down flat. He was just too young for me.

Events finally came to a head one night when we went out to the movies with a group of my friends. I thought I was I was being gentle when I said, in front of everyone, “I just don’t think I could date a younger man. It’s too weird.”

Adam was heartbroken and humiliated, but he never gave up being a perfect gentleman and a loyal friend. He was there when Stefan and other guys rejected me. He stayed up with me at night when I had a terrible cold. He tutored me in philosophy, Spanish, and physics. (I said he was brilliant!) But he never made me feel guilty to refusing him again and again and again.

His patient affection finally paid off. Over Christmas break in Atlanta, I found that I couldn’t live without him. He asked me out again at the end of January and we’ve been together ever since.

In retrospect, we’re both grateful for the challenges of our courtship. In those first four months, Adam learned patience, understanding, and hopefulness in the face of seemingly-impossible odds. And I will always feel blessed that I was the one worth fighting for. Our six-year courtship spanned three continents (North America, Europe, and Asia), three countries (the U.S., England, and Tawain), and seven states (Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Washington, DC). For our long-distance relationship to survive, we had to learn to trust each other completely and communicate even when we were far apart. The distance severely tested us, but, when we married in August almost three years ago, we both knew we were marrying someone worth the wait.

I hardly ever think about Adam’s age anymore—except when I marvel at the responsibility of a twenty-four-year-old father in a city where many twenty-somethings can’t even stay in stable relationships. I have no idea where Stefan is today, but I am so glad he looked at a little bit like Adam—at least from the neck down. Adam is the perfect man for me and I couldn’t imagine life without him.

 

Alison Solove is a wife and mother of one living in Washington, DC. She blogs about being a better woman and wife at ExperimentalWifery.

This Is How We Met: Leanne Penny's Story

 I must confess: these "love in the age of the internet" stories are some of my favorites.  (Don't read into that. Online dating isn't for me and while I've gone on a couple (admittedly good) dates with guys I met via Twitter, I'm still single.)

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Before facebook and twitter there was xanga, a blogging network where millions of people shared daily life and deep thoughts with people they didn’t know. I started blogging there under the moniker “ClumsyBallerina” as an outlet for my swirling thoughts on faith, love and life in general.

I’d been single for a while, my heart still bruised from the end of my last relationship where I was dumped via email. I was drifting, living at home and working as a secretary who moonlighted as a pizza delivery girl.

Late one night, after an evening of pizzas, I was surfing blog-rings on xanga and came across this college guy in Oklahoma who wrote profoundly about love, church and losing his father to cancer.

I left him a comment: “Hi, I got your weblog through a random click of the mouse.. I completely agree with your thoughts about what church is and isn’t... blessings to your family.”

He wrote back: “Hey, I just started reading your xanga... you seem like a person that I could really get to know and converse with... I’ll be keeping up with you... ~laterz~”

And just like that, Kel existed for me, We didn’t interact for nearly six months as he went through a time of deep grief while he cared for and eventually lost his father to brain cancer.

Even through we’d never met and hardly interacted, our connection was magnetic. The comments turned into emails and hours spend on AIM. One night I gave him my phone number on a dare over whether or not I had a “Northern Accent.”

There weren’t many phone calls at first, but anytime I needed him, he dropped everything to chat with me. I knew I mattered to him the night he drove to work and hunted through couch cushions for his cell phone just because I asked if we could talk on the phone.

That next week I had a date and I confessed to my friend Becky that I felt like I was cheating on Kel somehow. She told me it was silly to put dating on hold for a guy in Oklahoma that I’d probably never meet. Logically, I she was right, but my heart wasn’t convinced.

Then the news came that Kel and his best friend Andy were traveling to Chicago to check out a seminary and wondered if they could swing up to meet me. When the night came for us to meet, I was beyond anxious.

As I drove to the house where Kel was staying I promised a friend I’d check in within 10 minutes in case the “internet guy” was a creep. First I saw his car, a vintage Lincoln that he drove for the comfort, nicknamed “the couch on wheels.”

Then I saw him walk across the lawn in a gray button down shirt and a pair of cut-off khakis my heart jumped and my stomach knotted up. After thousands of miles and hours on the phone, here we were, just inches apart.

Over dinner I made awkward conversation while he threw straw wrappers at me, choosing to show his interest kindergarden style. Face to face connection proved difficult, the opposite of our easy breezy phone calls. When he left I wondered if I'd ever see him again.

Yet, a few months later I found an incredible deal on last minute airfare and hopped a plane to Oklahoma. As we drove together in the Lincoln, he reached for my hand and I let him hold it. The night before I flew home he kissed me and I kissed him back, a lot.

When I left our relationship was hopelessly undefined. He was all in but I was terribly confused and gave him an awful “maybe” when he asked if we were together. Then one night, months later, I called at 2 am to give him my “yes.”

After he graduated from the University of Oklahoma he moved to Michigan to closer to me as I finished out college. It was a hard road for him, he didn’t know anybody and the economy in Michigan was shot. We dated for another year before getting engaged and married in short order.

And now here we are on our 6th anniversary looking back over a path that’s seen us through 5 blogs, 3 states, 7 desks (we can’t commit) and 2 kids. I know him and still feel that I’ve only scratched the surface.

I had to dig for our original xanga connection comments, but now that I’ve sifted through the old blogs I’ve decided to print them out before they disappear. They’re an important piece of our quirky love story and a piece of our family history worth preserving.

 

Leanne Penny spends her days drinking coffee and chasing her two kids with her college-pastor husband in Ada, OK. When the kids are sleeping or decide to play with their toys she ignores the dishes and writes about her journey of hurting, healing, and choosing joy at www.leannepenny.com 

Twitter: @leannepenny

This Is How We Met: T.B. Pasquale's Story

T.B. was tricked into meeting her husband. I loved this unusual love story!

Want to submit your TIHWM story? Check out the guidelines here.

I never thought I would get married. I said this for the first couple of years after I was married and people would respond, almost immediately, with "Oh, you are a lovely girl, why did you think no one would marry you?"

It is so interesting how people hear things through the filter of their world view. I learned over time to clarify my statement: I never thought I wanted to get married. Apparently, this is an unfathomable concept for most. I didn't think I wasn't smart enough or pretty enough or good enough to be someone's somebody. I just wasn't completely sold (actually I wasn't at all sold) on the idea that I wanted somebody to be my someone.

The initial hump of singlehood after trauma and PTSD, followed by three years in a relationship that was just bad news, was rough, but I found the parameters of how I wanted my life to look and I lived my single life with intention. I would go to movies alone, eat meals in public in solitude, and began to enjoy the space without a “someone”. I felt safe and certain and my cocoon of singlehood warded off injury--emotional or otherwise. I found freedom (even if at times it was lonely) in being the single friend on a Friday night in NYC with all the couples and coming home to my apartment alone.

In some part, at its core my solitary life was a buffer between me and real intimacy--not just romantic intimacy (which is fleeting), but in many ways all manner of human and divine intimacy. But this isn't something I consciously acknowledged at the time. And it wasn’t the whole story. I really did like the silence of a quiet home with just me and a book or me and a movie, without the intrusive compromise of someone else to consider (some days I still like that).

By the time I met my would-be-husband I needed a lot of convincing that it made sense to couple up. I think if the introduction hadn't have been forced on me I never would have met him--on principle. I was morally against dating--it seemed like a painful and awkward endeavor, to be avoided at all cost. I was tricked into my first encounter with my future husband, Chris, by my closest friend from graduate school and her sister. They had him and his best friend show up at this seedy local bar where they had dragged me to--the kind with beer pong tables in the back. I had just come from a lackluster women’s poetry slam in the basement of a building on the Lower East side and I almost didn’t show.

I have no idea what we talked about that first night but I did learn that we were both therapists and both had a room full of books in our respective homes. We talked for hours but didn’t exchange numbers—I don’t think. The next time we collided among friends the conversation didn’t stop until three hours after he pulled up in front of my Hoboken apartment. As he said good night, I leaned in and kissed him, like it was natural. Then after I think we were both surprised and flustered and I ran inside my building, heart racing, cheeks blazing. It was like some sort of accidental compulsion—but felt comforting in the most unnerving way.

The third time we decided to intentionally meet at our only communal place of prayer--Barnes & Noble. He was Brethren and I was lapsed Catholic with a penchant for the eastern traditions, yoga, and meditation. But among books we were the same—ravenous word nerds. We scoured the religion and philosophy section and then passionately discussed Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer, Ghandi, and Rohr in the coffee shop until the store closed. We couldn't have been more the same and we couldn't have been more opposite. We both had a passion and a fire for God and therapy and life, but our philosophies on all points were diametrically opposed. I am pretty sure that was the night I fell in love--although I didn't admit it until months later.

I never intended on meeting Chris and I fought my feelings for him for a very long time. In many ways learning him, and letting go enough to love him was the thing that animated my soul, waking it from a sleep. Loving him was not about principles or self-imposed guidelines. It was messy and passionate and wild and beautiful. Loving him became something I never could have imagined loving someone could be--it was a conduit to helping me love God more sincerely.

I often think if marriage is anything it is a way for God to let us feel his love and our ability to love him in some tangible way. I think there are many kinds of love that can open us to the heart of God--being a spouse, being a parent, being a friend, or being clergy to name just a few. I don't think marriage is the only way to opening to that love, but for me it was the way that broke down my safety of solitude and gave me a greater personal "knowing" of God's love and how big it could be.

We got married in our living room in Kearny, New Jersey with a homemade ceremony of poems and personal psalms, my friend who introduced us as officiant (having been ordained for the service through a virtual certification the day before), surrounded by our closest family and friends and the soft flames of 50 tea light candles.

I never thought I would get married. It has been the hardest thing I have ever done and continue to do. Father James Martin, the Jesuit priest said, in the best explanation I have ever heard of celibacy, said that in not loving one person in particular he was given the space to love many people more deeply. I would say the same of the reverse in my life--in loving one person in particular I have been given the space in my heart and my soul to love many people more deeply. And love God more deeply.

I think there are many avenues to faith and love and God and an unraveling of the soul. This unexpected love which became my marriage has been mine.

________________________________________________________________

T.B. Pasquale is a contemplative prayer advocate, interfaith and ecumenical conversationalist, trauma therapist, young-ish adult ministry leader, and yoga teacher. She writes at www.crookedmystic.org and Seekers Magazine, can be found tweeting @tbpasquale, and is the founder of "The Society for Young Christian Contemplatives". She is working on two writing projects: "The Season of Dying" (nonfiction) and "The Barefoot Saints" (fiction).

This Is How We Met: Danielle Vermeer's Story

Even though she told me she's a Cubs fan (sacrilege!), I'm happy to share Danielle's story of love in the time of summer camp with you all.

Want to submit your TIHWM story? Check out the guidelines here.

Every summer in high school I attended a co-ed Christian camp where we worshiped with arms raised, talked about the immodesty of tank tops thinner than two-fingers' thickness, and learned how to be young men and women after God's own heart (in no particular order).  The memories of my adolescent coming of age and coming to Christ are some of the fondest I have.  It was at camp that I swayed on the worn, wooden swing near the lake, writing and praying in the early mornings before reveille.  It was at camp that I cultivated some of my most deep and enduring friendships.  It was at camp that I began writing love letters to my future husband.  And it is at camp that I met the love of my life and my best friend, my husband Mike.  

Month one: we meet.  The summer after my first year of college I served as a camp counselor for the first time. One of my best friends since my first year at camp, who was several years older, introduced me to one of the new counselors, a tanned, blonde-haired, blue-eyed guy with board shorts and a cartilage piercing who had attended college with my friend. I didn't think much of this hunk until my friend ever so unsubtly chimed, "Dani, Mikey thinks you're cute."  (For the record, she is the only one who could ever call us Dani and Mikey.)

Month two: we go on a non-date. A month later, my friend-turned-conniving matchmaker hosted a post-camp party.  In the midst of playing games, we somehow started watching repeats of SNL Celebrity Jeopardy.  Teary-eyed and with a knotted stomach from laughing so hard, I spotted Mike looking over at me, amused and enraptured with my response.  It stuck with him because a week or so later, he asked to grab coffee.  But I made it abundantly clear beforehand that it was a non-date since we would be just friends.  Four hours later, just a cup of coffee had not only turned into a blossoming friendship, but also into a lifetime of deep relationship.  We gave a (lingering) hug goodbye as I headed home and then headed back to college.

Month three: we begin to date long-distance.  We began talking almost every day.  Then one day Mike calls me, telling me that he is interested in pursuing a relationship and that even though it will be difficult long-distance, I'm worth it.  I'm so nervous and giddy and smiley that my teeth hurt.  Over the phone, hundreds of miles apart, we begin officially dating.  It even became Facebook official.

Month four: we have our first in-person, official date. A month later, I came home to run the marathon.  Mike picked me up for the airport and braved almost two hours of traffic to head downtown for our first real date.  (I later realized how much this meant because this small-town boy cannot -- I repeat -- cannot handle city traffic.)  We walked hand-in-hand and had our first kiss under the metallic, abstract sculpture in the middle of the park (you Chicagoans know what I'm talking about!).  Afterwards, we headed to his place to make homemade pesto pasta as we slow-danced to the first song on the mix I made him -- what many months later would be the song for our first dance.

Month eleven: we get engaged near the wooden swing at camp.  We had talked about it for months.  First in lofty hypotheticals.  Then thinking about the practicality given that we would be long distance for at least two more years while I finished college.  Then talking with my parents.  His parents.  Our friends.  Pastors and counselors.  Tentatively supportive, my parents put Mike through the gauntlet.  A week later, we said our first "I love you"s as Mike slipped the ring on my hand and we embraced next to the wooden swing near the lake at camp.  God has a funny way of bringing some things full-circle.  
 

Photo by Beyond the Well

Month thirty-five: we become one in marriage. (Yes, you did the math correctly. We were engaged for almost two very long years.)  Last June, surrounded by family and friends in a gorgeous, lily white church, we promised to love and cherish one another all the days of our lives in this holy, mysterious, fun, challenging, and life-giving journey from two to one.

 

Danielle blogs at from two to one about marriage, feminism, and faith and is especially interested in developing relationships among other self-identified feminists who practice their faith traditions. Connect with her via her blog, Twitter, or Facebook.