from Storyworth
I met my wife Ann through mutual friends, but the actual events leading up to our relationship are interesting and humorous. We had a mutual connection through Phil Jachowski who went to the same college as Ann, and dated one of her friends. Phil worked at the same company as I, and we did social things together.
One of those was a camping trip that Ann didn’t go on – I think her female friends purposefully didn’t invite her to have better odds of connecting with the guys. I was there. We partied the whole weekend, including smoking weed – which I brought. Back then, acquiring marijuana was complicated and illegal. I remember meeting our ‘supplier’ in various store parking lots to do the ‘deals’.
After the trip, Ann heard about how fun I was (including being able to get pot) and wanted to meet me. She was part of a large happy hour get-together at the 94th Aero Squadron – a bar and restaurant at the San Jose Airport with an aviation theme – including being able to listen at the tables to the air traffic controller communications. Much of the core of our social group was me and my coworkers: a dozen engineers fresh out of school that the company moved to California. Phil, being local, brought his local friends.
I was already seated with the gang when Ann arrived at happy hour, so she ended up sitting at the opposite end of the group. Ann was wearing a drapy dress that, to me, looked like a maternity dress. I thought she might be pregnant. This was the same year that Ann’s mom had died, and she was fresh from a trip to Mexico. I don’t think we interacted (much) during that happy hour, and Ann ended up dating one of my coworkers, Dan, for a month or two. Dan had a girlfriend back home in the midwest, and wasn’t interested in a serious relationship with Ann. Ann and I saw each other often during that time at mutual social gatherings, including at my townhouse in Campbell, CA.
It was at one of those gatherings at my townhouse that Ann made it obvious that she was interested in me. I don’t know whether she had an ongoing interest in me while she was dating Dan, or whether she just concluded that the relationship with Dan wasn’t going anywhere, but she eventually made her move. Guys can be dumb, and I’m probably dumber than most when it comes to women, so she may have tried to give me hints previously that she liked me – I don’t know. I do know that, when she nudged me over to share a chair with me at the table (we were playing cards, or doing card tricks, or something) then I finally realized that she liked me.
From then on, our relationship built – and it didn’t take long for us to conclude that this was a long-term thing, and that we should consider marriage. Within a year of when we first met, we were driving to or from somewhere – Ann’s dad’s or my brother’s – and I asked her hypothetically whether she’d be interested in getting married – and she said yes. We didn’t formalize it for several months, but we considered ourselves more or less committed at that point.
Ann’s dad was very old school, so we didn’t live together before marriage (not officially). We did do a trip to San Diego before marriage along with a bunch of other people, and slept on the living room floor with them – and Ann’s dad gave her a hard time about overnighting with a guy she wasn’t married to. We eventually got formally engaged, married, and had children. Her dad was civil to me, but I was not his favorite son-in-law.
So that is the story of how I met my wife, and how our relationship began. Ann is the best thing that has ever happened to me.