Ha, @BunsenBurner - I hated that torch, too! Luckily you can actually buy capillaries now that do the job just as well as the homemade ones. DH still cuts my TLC plates for me because I can never get them to break evenly…
I was 26 years-old and taking one graduate engineering course non-matriculated, she was a senior nursing student, and we ended up on the same men’s A-league soccer team. She was fit and physically very strong, right in my wheelhouse for what I considered attractive, skinny leg girls need not apply.
There’s a detail, though, that I tend to never mention. In my younger years I had pretty severe dismorphophobia. In high school I was convinced of my ugliness, placing me somewhere in the bottom three out of 600 students for attractiveness. I wouldn’t leave the house with a short haircut because my ears stuck out. My slightly crooked broken nose felt like a Jimmy Durante schnoz. Any blemish, to me, was a golf ball size boil.
There is just no way I could have met the love of my life any earlier. It took me until about age 24 or 25 to feel I was even passably presentable. It still dogs me, not as much, but enough that I skipped breakfast today because of my disgusting (to me) 3/4" stomach roll when I hunch forward. I am my own worst critic, yet not at all critical of others.
Last year my parents sent me a box of photos from my childhood and young adulthood. It surprised me that I was a fairly good looking young man. Unfortunately, it seems to have gone to the next generation and hit S2 the worst. He is 5’11", 175lbs with an impressively muscular physique, a good-looking freshman at ND and still never been on a date or kissed a girl.
Like my story, we trust it will eventually happen for him. I can’t help being a bit envious of all these stories where it all sounds so easy and automatic for others.
Met at church as youth advisors.
I worked as a nanny the summer before my senior year of college. I would often make phone calls to friends while the babies napped, and one day I called an ex-boyfriend with whom I had stayed good friends. The ex was taking classes during the summer and living on campus. The young man who answered my call had the sexiest voice I had ever heard. Just his “Hello?” gave me chills.
I asked “Is (First name of ex) there?”, and the sexy voice answered “This is (First name of ex)”. Well, I was absolutely sure it was not my ex. Turns out they have the same first name. Ex wasn’t there, so I spent the next hour talking to sexy-voiced roommate. There was an instant connection I had never felt with anyone before.
We went on to talk on the phone every day over the course of the next week. One night we literally talked all night long (and had to go to work and school the next day). We fell in love before we ever saw each other.
That weekend, my ex-boyfriend and his girlfriend (to whom he is married now), set us up on a blind double date. When I saw him walking toward the car, the deal was sealed. He told me later that he knew he would marry me the minute he got in the car. We were engaged three months later and married a month after our college graduation.
Six kids and 23 years later, his voice still gives me chills.
Bleachers at Fenway Park, 1989.
On a street corner one night after the bars closed, the summer after we both graduated college. I had just left a bar with friends, he was riding his bike home from a party. Someone in my group knew him, so we stopped to chat. He gave me his phone number, but I never called him. At the end of the summer, I ran into him in a bar, we talked, he invited me on a date, we went out every night for a week, then he moved back to the West Coast and I moved to NYC for a job. He visited me once about two months later, then we didn’t see each other for three years. I moved back to the area where we met (I had grown up there) and about two months later he happened to be passing through town to see friends. On a whim, he gave me a call, I happened to be home, we went on a date that night, then he left town, we dated long distance, got engaged about a year and a half later, been married now over 20 years.
In a bar.
I “re-met” by husband at our high school reunion when visiting my parents. Did the long distance thing then made the move back…permanently. Married 30+ years.
Met on commuter bus heading downtown during the fall after graduating from college (our first jobs right out of college). I was studying for the LSAT and had a large study book - he was taking it, too (“are you taking the LSAT in December?”). Good ice breaker. He moved up to Colorado from Texas because he loved to fly fish, hike and ski. 25 years married, two kids, and still going strong.
Met in college. We attended the same one. He was a freshman. I was a sophomore. Met when he showed up at my dorm apartment for a party. Been together ever since and married over 20 years.
Since this topic has come up several times, I’m sure I have said this. Met in the high school library. DH claims he had this lightening flash of the future “I’m going to marry this girl”. Despite the fact that he continued to date the girlfriend he already had. I have no memory of that meeting. Our mutual friends nudged us together. We had a few dates, decided to be friends. Best friends. Got serious my freshman year, married my junior year. 42 years in April.
eta - got serious freshman year of college, and married junior year when DH was grad student and I was 20. Just realized it could read as getting married at 16.
We met at church. H and I had just moved to the same city. We met in September, got engaged 6 weeks after we met, and were married that June. Will be 34 years this June.
Well, we did. But once we got serious we realized we wanted to be close to family. So where’d we end up? Davenport… her hometown.
I miss the hiking and views in CO.
As simple as like before. Don’t have any special plan to meet my wife. Though I don’t get her all the time. Probably 1-3 days per month (but not every month). Though it’s bit hard to control myself. But I can manage it. 
@“aunt bea”: What was the problem with this? Is there some rule here? Did you tell your ex you’d never date his friend? I don’t understand why you think this was bad. Nice story though.
We also met in college! We had a couple classes together sophomore year but didn’t become friends until spring of junior year. I was dating someone else, but had a huge crush on H and actually told my friends that I wanted to marry “that guy” - haha. Truth be told, I said that in large part because he was (IMO) the most handsome guy I had ever seen!
Towards the end of that semester, he asked me out but I said “no” because I was seeing someone else. Fast forward to fall of senior year, I had broken up with the other guy and by Halloween H and I were inseparable. We got married 3 years later. We’ve been married 28 years together 31, and are still inseparable. And, I still think he is most handsome man on the planet :x
Count me as another who met my husband freshman year of college…
We met in the snack bar the first week of school where we discovered that we were both from the same area of Virginia which was 10 hours away from our school.
After being good friends for 2 years, and sharing many drives and flights home, we decided to become roommates beginning junior year along with a couple of other friends. Before 2nd semester we realized we wanted to become more than friends but kept it from our roommates because we didn’t want to make it awkward or uncomfortable for them.
I also did not tell my parents, who were paying my rent, because I knew they would not approve of me living with my boyfriend (esp a non-jewish one!) so I waited until I had a job at graduation and could pay my own way and sprung it on them. It went as poorly as I thought. But, 24 years of marriage and 3 kids later, they have come around
Now that I have a daughter in college, I get it.
I think I met my wife in the dining room of our residential college in the winter of my junior year, after I returned from a semester working in New York City. She was sitting with a friend of mine (a roommate the following year) and his girlfriend, with whom my future wife was friends. She had moved off campus – she hated living in a dorm – but she still ate one meal a day in the college. (She doesn’t remember that lunch at all. She thinks we met briefly a year earlier, and that the first time we actually talked was what I remember as the third time.)
We didn’t click immediately. I was definitely interested by the second or third time I met her, but she deflected a lot. We became Occasional Long Talks About Serious Issues friends. I learned she was involved (but not that seriously) with someone who had transferred to another college. From time to time, we would have quasi-dates – lunch or dinner together – but she was something of a BWOC and highly scheduled. I was low priority. I would call her up to suggest lunch or dinner, she would give me a date three weeks in the future, then call me back four days before and reschedule another two weeks forward. I stalked her in the library. Years later, I read the letters she was writing to her parents at that time – she was clearly interested in me, but thought I was too conventional for her. We didn’t actually become romantically involved until after I graduated and left town. We had been a couple for a full year before we could both live in the same city.
My son and his wife followed a not-too-dissimilar pattern. They met as freshmen in their second college class ever, wound up in the same major (which neither had originally expected) and taking a number of classes together, but only really started to socialize together after they had graduated. They didn’t become a couple until after she had started medical school in a different city. They were long distance (but not that long, only ~90 miles) for over three years.
I think it’s interesting how many of us met our spouses in college. It’s not that common among our friends, and it’s not that common among our children’s friends, either.
One of my college friends married her college boyfriend maybe three years after we graduated. I went to school in NYC but am from the mid-Atlantic. The majority of my college friends were from the NY/NJ/CT area. I stayed in NYC for a few years after graduating, then moved back to my home area. I only really kept in touch with two of my friends who also left NYC but then with FB, got back in touch with my old group of friends and eventually we all met up back in NYC for a weekend. I could not believe how many of my friends had married guys we had been friends with in college. None dated in college and were not dating the three years I was living there after graduation but at some point after I left, apparently many of them coupled up. It was a funny surprise b/c for nearly all the couples, I never ever would have imagined them dating, let alone marrying!
Thinking of my current group of adult friends, I can only think of one couple that met in college. I have two high school friends who married guys we went to h.s. with, though neither dated them in h.s. One is now getting divorced, after almost 25 years of marriage. They were the couple that married immediately after college (seriously, one week) but the other couple didn’t really start dating until the end of college and didn’t until our late 20s.
My turn
Met in an English class back in 2010 (high school) (10th grade)
Since I like to talk a LOT, the teacher got mad and sat me in front of a silent/shy student. I turned around and said “Damn you cute, let me touch your hair” After that interaction,we kept talking for two years. I made it clear as water that I wanted him. I would ask questions like “Have you ever dated a Hispanic chick?” “Does your Asian mom mind if you dated a Hispanic girl?” “Are you single?” His answer “Yes” but that’s all I got from him.
Ugh…this guy still didnttakeahint.com ~ X(
I really started to give up on hope. We worked on many group projects in 11th grade. We even danced to YMCA and this dork still didn’t take the hint. We reached senior year of high school and I knew I had to let go. I believed that once we graduated high school he was going to Sayōnara on me. It broke my heart to see him go, because I truly believed me and him would make a cool team.
Anyway, he got TRIGGERED when he found out another guy was going to ask me out for homecoming. He popped the question and asked my mother for permission to date me. After six years of dating (still counting :D) I asked him why didn’t he ask me out sooner? He said, “I thought you were too good for me.” :-/
ARE YOU SERIOUS>>>>This guy had me in the friend zone for two years…
I bet you $10 bucks this guy is going to pop the question (marriage) after 14 years of dating lol…we are both 24
to be continued…LOL! =))