How love starts: Husband and I

Husband and I have been on a serious Spring Cleaning kick these past few months. Those of you who’ve been coming to #IdeaPotluck, you know what I mean, you lucky ducks — walking away with the 1994 Chicago Bulls Cookbook, bootleg P90X DVDs, every mid-90s CD known to man. It’s been SO refreshing to get rid of stuff.

It’s also been a wonderful journey down childhood-college-job-housing-significant other memory lane. From finding horribly overdramatic and detailed short stories I wrote to the much too-high credit card statement the month I moved into my first adult apartment, we’ve been intermittently laughing, sniffling, and knowingly-smiling both together and by ourselves since May.

One of the stumble-upons was a collage I made for Husband a few months into dating. Inside-jokes, photos, screenshots of emails and texts.

I’ve always been fascinated with the decisions we make and how what can seem so inconsequential and small, what can be a blip on your radar, turns out to be one of the most life-altering choices you’ve ever made. The collage was a reminder of this, as it includes the first exchange between Husband and I after we met at one of my events five years ago.

I stared, through welling-eyes, at the email addresses, the dates, the timestamps, the salutations (or lack there of), the sign-offs (or lack there of), the punctuation, the word choice… did he or I have any inkling that —

• • a month later we’d go on our first date (I didn’t realize it was a date),
  • seven months later he’d say “I love you” for the first time,
  • twelve months later I’d visit his family and the South for the first time,
  • thirteen months later we’d collaborate professionally for the first time (me student/boss, him teacher/employee),
  • fifteen months later he’d move in,
  • two years later we’d get engaged,
  • four years later we’d get married?

I don’t think I did. I just thought he was a nice guy with really good story-telling, voice-projection, and eye-contact abilities whom I could see hanging out with again.

Little did I know that my decision to post a note about my Minglers on the Chicago Improv Network, his decision to re-enter society post-breakup via a Mingler, and both our decisions to be ourselves on the night of December 19th, 2009 would be how love starts.