Mine is boring. We both worked for the same company, separate locations. I do remember the first time I ever saw him. And he says he immediately wondered if I were “marriageable”.
We were “fraternity brothers” (Delta Sigma Pi). She had to walk by my dorm on the way to our meetings and in the fall it was dark. I called to ask if she would walk with me because I didn’t want to be molested. While I did want to know her better I felt it would be safer for her if she had someone to walk with. We became friends for a couple of years befor we realized we were more.
H and I were both poor grad students. We both worked for the campus food service. I was the student workers manager, preparing the student worker schedules and payroll, in addition to working some shifts at taking money at the door.
H asked me to work for him one dinner time because he had an exam that night and wanted extra time to study. I said sure because I could use the extra money. Our boss make him take me out to dinner to thank me (I would have been satisfied with the bigger pay check but she wouldn’t give up).
The rest is history and we will be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary this Wednesday. Our former boss is our daughter’s god mother.
I met my ex when a mutual friend invited a group of people to backpack to the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the winter. No longer married, but we were for 23 years before divorcing,
The old fashione way: our mothers set us up. My kids are laughing at me when I offer them my services though 
We were in the same small undergrad program. He apparently met me the first day of college and instantly had a crush. I don’t remember this 
I remember really hanging out with him the first time one weekend night when I just wandered around the dorm looking for people who weren’t partying. He was hanging out with a group of friends playing games and I sat in. We were friends for over a year before we started dating (I was in another relationship).
Fun fact: we’re the first couple from our program (we were the 3rd full graduating class… 7th year of the program when we graduated) to marry. Other grads have married but we’re the first to marry another grad from the program.
She was the friend of a friend. I had a business trip to her town, and she and my friend tried to set me up with a friend of hers who was moving to my town. That was a non-starter, but then she had a business trip to my town, and I put her up in my guest room for the weekend since she wanted to stay over and play tourist. Nothing happened, although I definitely thought she was wonderful, and I didn’t hear from her … until she had another trip a few months later and stayed for the weekend again. She moved to my town two months after that just in time for Christmas and we were married the following June – 29 years ago.
My HS friend (all girl school) introduced me to her friend (all boy school) who was headed to my college; we were housed in the same building different floors; his HS friend/roommate became my husband.
The Old Fashioned Way II: he was a TA in a class I took in my senior year. We didn’t start dating until later. I swear. 
I had just split up with an emotionally abusive boyfriend and was grieving the death of my grandmother who raised me when a college friend convinced me to go on a vacation to Charleston, SC to visit some Air Force friends before he joined the seminary to become a priest . I had a friend who had recently moved to SC , so I decided to go. We drove from Maryland to SC with a broken air conditioner. To say that I looked less than attractive when we arrived on base was an understatement. We went into the barracks to get a key for my friend . My husband opened the door.
I met my husband and another one of my friend’s friends that weekend. I went out with all of them in a group until the night before I left. I can remember thinking that my husband would make someone an excellent husband one day, unfortunately it wouldn’t be me. 4 months later after daily phone calls and several trips, he arrived with an engagement ring and a moving truck. 10 months later we were married. This October we will be married 25 years.
A combination of two old-fashioned ways: We met at a summer job and my mother set us up.
I got a seasonal job in a swimming pool store after my junior year of high school. He had just completed his first year of college and was working in the same store. We rarely saw each other that summer, though, because he mostly worked in the office – where my mother was the bookkeeper – and I mostly worked on the sales floor as a cashier.
My mother said many positive things about him to me. I suspect she also said many positive things about me to him.
The following year, when we both returned to our summer jobs, he walked up to my cash register on his first day and asked me to go to the movies with him. We got married four years later, two days after my college graduation.
If you ever meet him, don’t tell him he was manipulated by his future mother-in-law. But he was.
My parents went to the same college, where they were both on the track and field/cross country teams. My dad is a year younger. They met at a frat party. My mom was interested in my dad’s preppy roommate, until my dad worked up the (liquid) courage to speak to her.
Twenty-odd years later, it’s my first night of orientation week and I’m chatting up a guy I’d seen on my class’s Facebook page. Then, I meet his roommate. I have been dating said roommate ever since (almost a year). History repeats itself—so far, at least.
My boss set us up, h worked at a different location and was friends with my boss. At a district meeting he came up to me to introduce himself and my boss orchestrated having a bunch of us go out afterwards.
I was volunteering at a suicide hotline on the overnight shift. Someone had left an old copy of one of those city magazines in the office. I looked through the personal ads and one really jumped out. But the magazine was old, and I didn’t think I would hear from her. I wrote and, indeed, did not hear back initially.
Eventually she called. It turned out she had met some guys who hadn’t worked out, and had just about given up on the ad. But one day she picked up her mail and grabbed my letter just as she was heading out the door to go overseas for a few weeks. She read my letter on the airplane and ended up carrying it all over England and Wales! She called the day she got back to the US. We got married a year later, and that was 25 years ago.
We were both R.A.s in undergrad. Met at a party.
Modern day classifieds worked for me. I was fairly new to Seattle, and my boyfriend had literally left town, my mother had passed away, and my best friend was moving back home. I worked in an office where everyone was much younger than me and wanted to meet some people my own age (late 30’s) so I went on a “friends only” website and responded to one ad where it was clear the guy had a sense of humor. He was also from a family of 7, liked to read, had a background in communications, and thought a day of “antiquing” sounded like a good time.
As it turned out, like the girl in @MidwestDad3 , he had actually written his ad long ago-a whole year, to be exact. But for some reason he decided to check the new responses that day. We messaged back and forth for a few weeks, began talking on the phone daily, and finally met at an old movie house for a classic movie. He says he knew that first day I was the one for him, but it took me a but longer to realize I had a gem. It was a few dates in when I explained about my two older kids, contrary ex, etc. and he just smiled and took my hand. We’ll be married 17 years in a month.
I was a graduate student, working part-time as a waitress, and served dinner to two nerdy guys. It was a slow evening so we chatted. One of them encouraged the other to ask for my phone number.
We’ve been married 28 years and the friend was our best man and is also the godfather to our older daughter.
College - same dorm. He invited me out to the Navy Ball and I was convinced he was the most stuck up guy I’d ever met. One of my good friends told me she was sure we were going to get married. I looked at her with scorn at the joke. She told me she wasn’t joking. I laughed.
It wasn’t just my opinion of him either. He was voted “Most Likely to Get Shot by His Own Troops” in the senior superlatives.
But… his folks sent him money each week and he used that to lure me out of the dining hall and into restaurants.
And we went on walks - long walks - then trips, short first, then longer.
Later that summer we were married (7 months later?). My friend was a Bridesmaid.
It’s coming up on 28 wonderful years this summer… absolutely no regrets. We still love traveling together, and pretty much everything else about life.
And guys can change. There’s no way he’d win the same category now. He’s one of the most loved and respected guys doing his job - fully able to work with both friendly and difficult clients - even gov’t entities!
Fun thread.
I’m surprised how many of you got married a fairly short time after first meeting!
My wife and I disagree on how/when we met. We were one year apart at the same university, and in the same residential grouping/dining hall. I think we met during early winter of my junior (her sophomore) year when I sat down at lunch with a friend (who became my roommate the next year) and his girlfriend, and a friend of his girlfriend, to whom I have now been married for more than 30 years. I didn’t initially notice the girlfriend friend; I was just looking for people I knew to sit with. By the end of lunch, I was interested, though. She thinks that she met me briefly about a year earlier, but doesn’t remember that lunch at all. She thinks the first time she spoke to me was when she had been visiting another friend who lived four flights up a stairwell from my room, and she ran into me on her way down. I know she’s wrong because I already knew I liked her when I stopped her to talk on her way past my door.
It was about another year and a half (and my graduation) before we actually became romantically involved. At the time, she claimed not to have realized I had been trying to court her. However, I have since seen her letters home from that period, and she absolutely knew I was courting her but felt ambivalent about being courted by anyone as conventional as I and was trying to discourage me. (There was another, long-distance relationship involved, too. She told me about it, and it did discourage me somewhat, although it was clear she was not deeply committed to that.) It didn’t help that we had very different social circles with only a few overlaps. Lots of people knew I liked her, and a few people knew she liked me, and a couple of people were in both sets, but absolutely no one thought it was a good idea, so no one helped promote the relationship. Plus, she was something of a BWOC and very busy; having lunch or dinner with her took a lot of planning and often a couple of cancellations/re-schedulings.
It took us five years from becoming a couple to getting married, because we didn’t live in the same place for the first, fourth, and fifth of those years.