Share Our Lives: How We Met Our Significant Other

It's the second Monday of the month so it's time to link up with Sarah, Dara, Joanne, Adrienne, and Jen. (Click on each name to go their blogs.) This is a link up where we share our lives and today we're sharing how we met our significant other and/or best friend. Because I love to tell a story (why else would I blog?!?!), I've decided to share both of these stories. However, I'll have to share how Janice and I met in a different post because my and Dave's story got really long!

 

The first official picture of us as a couple! December 2006

(Dave often has his eyes closed in pictures.)

The short story is that Dave and I met through mutual friends, and wouldn't have gotten together if it weren't for Google! #truestory

The long story is...

In the late 90s, early 2000s, I co-owned a house with eleven other people. Besides those of us who owned it, sometimes other rooms were rented by friends of ours. When we sold the house in August 2002, I lived on my own in an apartment. I was 30, single, and many of my friends were married and starting their families. They were happy to do things with me until about 7:30 at night when their toddlers had to go to bed! As for me, I was still ready to hang out for a few hours.

One of the guys who had rented a room at our house had moved to live with another group of friends at 110 Columbia St. "110" (as it was known) was owned by one of the guys who lived there and it was a magnet for people to gather. I stopped by to visit my friend once and got drawn into the group of people who lived there. The guys at 110 were some of the friendliest, most welcoming people I'd ever met, and most importantly, they enjoyed hanging out past 8pm!

110 hosted Super Bowl parties, game nights, Mario Kart parties, BBQs, and arranged big groups of people to go to movie premieres and even the opera in Toronto. Dave was a part of the group who variously lived, or socialized, at 110 so we met probably in the winter of 2003. My first clear memory of Dave is the night that he and another girl announced that they were "officially going out." Since the friend I'd originally stopped by to visit and I had some major flirting going on, while Dave and I definitely hung out as a part of the group, there was never romantic interest there.

This is the group of people who attended the opera. Yesterday, Dave and I were laughing at the fact that we were beside each other in this picture, taken in spring 2006.

At this point, I was working full-time and then I also had a part-time job working at Chapters. I would work at Chapters until 10:30pm and then head to 110 a couple of nights a week to watch TV, play games, or just be with people. On Thursday nights, the group would hold off on watching CSI until midnight so they could watch it with me after I'd finished work. After all, we were mostly single, and night owls, and could survive on 4-5 hours of sleep a night. Thursday late night CSI watching with about twenty people on a huge 52" screen is a really fun memory of this time for me.

After awhile I got tired of not having a boyfriend and decided that Nick, off the original CSI, was my boyfriend. It became a huge running joke and people were very supportive of the "long distance aspect" of our relationship. Ha ha ha! During May 2005, Nick was featured in an episode called "Grave Danger," and following that episode whenever Nick would have flashbacks, I would jokingly say, "Don't worry sweetie, I'll just scoop you up and hold you."

In the summer of 2006, friends of ours announced at dinner one night that they had bought a house. However, they were living in California at the time (he was one of the first people I know to work for Google and is the reason I have a Gmail account -- Dave and I got some of the earliest invitations when it was a private Google service but employees were allowed to send them to their friends!), so needed people to rent their house. Dave and I were both at this supper and said, "We'll live there." Then we looked at each other and went, "Sure. That would work."

Dave and I at our house, January 2007

About a week later, someone at church was giving away tickets to a Jays game and Dave, another friend, and I drove to the game and we had a more serious conversation of "Could we really be housemates?" on the way there. Considering how big of Jays fans we are now, and how few games I'd gone to before that time, it's funny to me that this big conversation was had on the way to a Jays game. We moved in, as housemates, in October 2006.

As the only two people living in the house, we had lots of time to spend together and get to know each other better. And over the course of a couple of months, we started to have feelings for each other. I never would have said anything but Dave was braver than I was, and one night he told me that friends of his from the synagogue were trying to set him up with someone. And he realized, he'd rather be with me. So when he told me that, he said, "I'm not asking you out. But I'm saying, if I did want to maybe, someday, ask you out, what would you think of that?" We still laugh about all the qualifiers in his question!

We had a few weeks of conversation about it -- after all, I'm ten years older, and we have different religions, but we ended up deciding to give it a try. It was very weird dating as housemates because, normally if you're dating someone, you need to go out on dates to get to know each other. But we'd been part of the same friend group for years, and were sharing a house just the two of us, so we didn't go on a lot of official dates. We started dating on November 27, 2006.

We decided that one thing we wanted to do was travel together so we went to New York in January 2007 to meet Dave's grandparents, see Les Mis on Broadway for Dave's birthday, and see some other sights.

Playing on the piano at FAO Schwartz, New York City, January 2007 

It wasn't all easy though as Dave's ex-girlfriend had some physical and mental health issues. She ended up stalking us, showing up at our house in the middle of the night, crying and threatening to kill herself. We spent a few nights in the ER with her, trying to get her help. For various reasons, we had no one place to live in the summer of 2007 so we house sat for a few different families I knew from church and travelled to Europe for three weeks. Since Dave's ex was stalking us, we asked our friend group to not tell her where we were living. It was a bizarre couple of months, and put a lot of external pressure on our relationship. We almost got engaged one night in April 2007 but decided that we needed to wait until we could just be us -- without the pressure of avoiding Dave's ex, a trip to Europe, and an impending cross country move. I'm really glad we didn't get engaged that night because really good friends of ours, who had been dating for a few years, announced their engagement a few hours later!

Playing around with our friend's engagement ring, April 2007

We started this blog in June 2007 as a way of keeping our friends and family up to date as we travelled and moved across the country. And why is it called "Here's The Scoop"? Well, Dave admitted that one of the first things that made him notice me in a different way led back to those CSI nights I talked about earlier. When I would talk about scooping Nick up, Dave says he thought, "I wouldn't mind her scooping me up." And then he wondered why he was thinking that! So then "scooping up" became an inside joke for us and our blog name played into that.

Engagement photo, October 2007

Once we had successfully travelled to Europe, moved across the country, and got settled in Alberta, we got engaged on Thanksgiving Day, 2007. We got married in June 2008, back in Ontario, and the rest of our history is pretty much documented on the blog! Hahaha!!!

This was so fun to write, to remember back to the prehistory of our relationship, and the beginnings of our time together. Since I think it's important to remember beginnings, I'm also going to blog about how I met my best friend, Janice, later this week. Come back to read about that. Thanks to the bloggers below for such a fun topic!