So, some­one com­mented that I had started to talk about how I met Jason but never fin­ished the story. I have had a busy week and been pretty tired at the end of the days, so I put it off, because it is a pretty long story. Tonight, though, I’m going to rem­i­nisce and do my best to make it as inter­est­ing to you as it is to me.

The first time I met Jason was at a Cam­pus Cru­sade Christ­mas Con­fer­ence in Min­neapo­lis. How­ever, that wasn’t the first time I had ever seen him. He was in my fresh­man Applied Cal­cu­lus class. It was a huge class of like 150–200 peo­ple (I’m ter­ri­ble at esti­mates, but this is how I remem­ber it). We had never talked because of the size of the class, but I knew he was in my class. He didn’t remem­ber me from class though. When we are at Christ­mas Con­fer­ence, a friend intro­duced us. We played the card game Hearts with a cou­ple other friends. I don’t play cards, and I am not good at card games. How­ever, that night, I man­aged to win the game by a LOT. We talked a bit through­out the week­end. Noth­ing par­tic­u­larly excit­ing as far as I remember.

We went home and the semes­ter started. We didn’t have any classes together from then on, but we had lots of mutual friends. We ended up being at a lot of the same events and activ­i­ties. Toward the end of Jan­u­ary, Jason called me one day and asked if I wanted to go to a movie. I’m not sure what in the world I was think­ing, but I chose the movie In Dreams with Annette Ben­ing. I chose the movie, and now I have to won­der what in the world I was think­ing!?!? It wasn’t a blind date, but we def­i­nitely didn’t know each other well, nor was I plan­ning on hold­ing on tight to his arm and bury­ing my head in his shoul­der. I don’t know.

We kept see­ing each other. We ended up dat­ing through the rest of the school year, that sum­mer, and into the fall. Then, it hap­pened. Jason men­tioned in pass­ing some­thing about sav­ing money and about feel­ing more seri­ous about me. I flipped out and did the only log­i­cal thing. I broke up with him. Dur­ing the time we were dat­ing, we had spent a lot of time together or talk­ing on the phone. He took the breakup very hard. I knew that he was upset about it and that he was hav­ing a hard time, but I didn’t know how to be a friend to him with­out being a girlfriend.

I had told Jason that I felt like he was expect­ing too much from me in the rela­tion­ship and he needed to develop other friend­ships. So, while we were bro­ken up, he did just that. He made some great friends and become one of the more pop­u­lar peo­ple in the cir­cle of friends we were a part of. He really grew as a per­son and a friend dur­ing this time. After a few months, I could see that he was a com­pletely dif­fer­ent per­son. Dur­ing this time, we saw a lot of each other, but we rarely talked. I made sure of that. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t seek him out, and I often ran away from him if I felt he was going to attempt to talk to me. My friends often ran inter­fer­ence for me. They would talk to him while I would escape and avoid.

For about a year, we didn’t talk much. Dur­ing that year, I spent sev­eral months work­ing at a camp in the Bound­ary Waters Canoe Area in north­ern Min­nesota. While I was there, I ended up dat­ing some­one else. It was one of those rela­tion­ships. There was no poten­tial there. We didn’t click, and it wasn’t healthy for either of us. Great, huh? I ended that rela­tion­ship the day before I turned 21, and I didn’t feel any regret at any point afterwards.

In Jan­u­ary of 2001, I was work­ing at my on-campus job when I found out that Jason had taken a job across the hall­way from me. At some point, things had become less awk­ward for us, and I didn’t think any­thing about Jason being in the same build­ing as me every day. There were quite a few col­lege aged work­ers in my office and in his. We vis­ited. We got cof­fee in the break room. We became friends again. At some point, I asked Jason if he would help me with some com­puter prob­lems I was hav­ing. He told me sure, but I had to make him sup­per and help him dye his hair. I fig­ured it wasn’t a bad trade off. He came over a few times and worked on my com­puter. At the time, I didn’t know it, but later he told me he could have fixed my prob­lems in one evening, but he kept drag­ging it out to be able to spend more time together. (I never had a clue!)

Dur­ing this time, Jason had been look­ing for jobs. He was plan­ning to grad­u­ate in May, and he needed a job. He inter­viewed for a job in Mitchell, SD and one in Min­neapo­lis, MN. Nei­ther of those ended up work­ing out. I knew at this point I was inter­ested in him, but I also knew that he was going to move in just a cou­ple months, so there was no rea­son to start a rela­tion­ship that wouldn’t go anywhere.

Feb­ru­ary came, and so did Valentine’s Day. One of my room­mates had a very steady boyfriend, so she was pretty excited to be receiv­ing a dozen roses. My other room­mate didn’t have a boyfriend, but she wasn’t ever short on male admir­ers. She was darn cute and nice! I was unat­tached and expected noth­ing. Shock­ingly, I got a bou­quet of red roses with­out a card. I called my dad and thanked him for the flow­ers. He didn’t know if they were from him and my mom, but he played along and said thanks. My mom called later, and she denied send­ing the flow­ers. Out of nowhere, she said, “They’re from Jason.” I told her they couldn’t be. He wasn’t inter­ested in me any­more. I’d had my chance.

Later that night, I did get a call from Jason. He was at a Valentine’s Day sup­per at his church for col­lege stu­dents where the guys cooked sup­per for the women. We vis­ited a lit­tle on the phone, and I asked how his sup­per was going. Then, he told me that the roses were from him. Then, he said bye and that he’d see me at work.

Um, what??? Why would you send roses to some­one with no card, tell her they are from you, and then nothing?

I spent quite a bit of time pray­ing and think­ing and read­ing my bible. I knew that when we had first dated Jason had been very seri­ous about our rela­tion­ship and had had a very hard time with the breakup. I knew that if I was going to con­sider being in a rela­tion­ship with him again, I needed to also con­sider mar­riage. I know that sounds like a huge leap. I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily think that dat­ing equaled engage­ment, but I knew that in order for it to be fair to both of us, I had to be ready for it to go that way.

A few days later, I was leav­ing town for a wed­ding. I was sup­posed to be leav­ing on Thurs­day after­noon, but I ended up not feel­ing well. I stayed home and took a nap. At some point that day, our phone rang. It was Jason. He didn’t want to talk to me though. He was talk­ing to my room­mate and one of my best friends at the time. He was ask­ing her what I thought of him, if I was inter­ested, what he should do, etc. She was giv­ing me big wide eyes and mouthing “what do I say???” I just layed on the chair and lis­tened to her side of the con­ver­sa­tion instead of let­ting poor Jason know I was there. Poor guy. She ended up telling him that I was indeed inter­ested in him, and that if he wanted to pur­sue dat­ing, I was prob­a­bly interested.

The next week, Jason came over to my apart­ment. We talked about us and the rela­tion­ship and how we had already dated. We decided that we would really watch our time closely. We didn’t want to com­pro­mise our rela­tion­ships with friends, our classes, or our­selves by spend­ing all of our time together right away.

At that time, I Kissed Dat­ing Good­bye by Josh Har­ris was a pretty pop­u­lar book. I was read­ing at that time, and it was actu­ally that book (although I’m fuzzy on specif­i­cally what in the book) that helped me decide I was ready to start dat­ing Jason again.

At some point in all of this, Jason was offered the interim posi­tion he had already been doing and was asked to apply for the per­ma­nent posi­tion. This was a load off my mind because it meant he wouldn’t be mov­ing after all. How­ever, the uni­ver­sity and bureau­cracy being what they are, the posi­tion ended up not com­ing through.

We con­tin­ued dat­ing, and while we were exclu­sive and didn’t see any­one else, we weren’t extremely seri­ous. That sum­mer, I went back to the Bound­ary Waters in north­ern Min­nesota to coun­sel at the same camp for a sec­ond sum­mer. Being sep­a­rated was hard. For me, it was eas­ier because I was busy for about 18 hours a day with my campers. At the end of the sum­mer, I went back home, and it was a lit­tle weird for me. It was almost like start­ing over a lit­tle bit.

Also dur­ing the sum­mer, Jason had been offered and had taken a job with the state of North Dakota. He trained teach­ers to use tech­nol­ogy. This involved a lot of dri­ving and a fair amount of time away from home for train­ing and work trips. So, after being apart all sum­mer, we were now apart when I thought we would get to spend time together. Our rela­tion­ship sort of car­ried on as it had been in the spring.

Then, came Sep­tem­ber. I’m not sure what changed, and look­ing back, nei­ther is Jason. He went on a trip for work to Hous­ton, TX, and he was gone for 4 or 5 days. While he was gone, I decided (or finally real­ized) I was in love with him and wanted to get mar­ried. I could barely wait for him to get home from his trip! I think I man­aged to wait until the day after he got home, but as we were watch­ing tv and doing home­work, I said to him, “Where is this rela­tion­ship going?” Shocked (under­stand­ably), he said “what do you mean?” I told him that I was ready to be seri­ous and that if he was, I thought we should talk about that. If he wasn’t I didn’t know where we were going. Once he picked his jaw up off the floor (again, poor guy), he told me that I should prob­a­bly fig­ure out what kind of ring I wanted if we were to get engaged.

From that point, things moved pretty quickly. We had “the talk” in the mid­dle of Sep­tem­ber. We got engaged in the mid­dle of Octo­ber, and we were mar­ried in June of 2002. Some of my fam­ily was shocked. At our pre­vi­ous fam­ily gath­er­ing (the wed­ding in Feb), I hadn’t men­tioned any­one. Then, at Christ­mas, I was engaged.
I guess you just can’t plan those things.

Through all of our dat­ing, I always knew that Jason had seri­ous feel­ings for me and that he was very sure of our rela­tion­ship. I only found out dur­ing our engage­ment how sure he was of our rela­tion­ship. He told me that the night we met, he had been sit­ting across the room from me, looked at me, and he knew at that moment that we were going to get married.

*sigh* What more could a girl hope for?