The other night, Patrick and said something about Meghan (his sister) being too young for something. And I said 'Well you were just a year older than her when we started dating.' Holy cow... she's in 10th grade. So actually, he was less than a year older than her. It was the summer after 10th grade for him (11th for me) when we started dating the first time. August 8, 2002. It didn't last very long the first time, and a year later we started dating again, August 9, 2003. That one lasted. (For the most part... there were certainly some ups and downs.) Can you believe that? 2002. It seems like so long ago. And it was... we're certainly completely different people today than we were 7 years ago. Hopefully everyone is somewhat different than they were at 16. Care to hear the story? Well, ok!
(This memory of our conversation a couple days ago and now the blog post was inspired by
Courtney's post, and you should really read hers because it's better written and a slightly more grown-up story. :-) )
In May/June of 2002, I had recently broken up with someone I had been dating for a long time. (Yeah, I was 17. I don't strongly recommend having dated someone for a few years when you're 17. At least not the way I did it... it was a little too intense for my age and I knew the whole time it wasn't someone I should marry.) Anyway, it was sort of a weird time for me after we broke up because I was so used to being around that person all the time, SO I made what turned out to be a fantastic decision. I started spending every waking moment at church. Turns out, Patrick decided that summer to do the same. Which meant we spent every waking moment together. At first it was nothing... we just happened to both be up there, with mutual friends, spending a lot of unplanned time together. Then, we started doing things together, just the two of us, and by the end of the summer it had sort of turned into dating. (I'll let you in on a little secret... dating for us didn't mean much at that time. We went shopping together for some nice clothes we needed for a student leadership trip we were going on together, etc. But we started CALLING it dating, so it counts.)
I can't skip telling this story as I recall the first times we did stuff just the two of us. We were on the aforementioned shopping trip. It was raining. Patrick locked his keys in his car. (Managed to grab his palm pilot though. He loved that thing back then.) He called his mom to see if she would bring him an extra set of keys. (He drove a white Saturn at the time... it wasn't his favorite. Looking back it wasn't a bad car at all. Mine was. Anyway, that's a different story.) She just happened to be at the mall also, and so she met up with us to do some shopping. He was not at all excited she was doing this, just for the record. It was our first "date." :-) I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing... you'll see why. So she met up with us, and we went into a department store to look at dress pants for him. He went in and tried some on and came back, out, and she sort of pulled on the waistband and said 'Is there enough room in the crotch?' Ohhh it was so funny. I thought he would die of embarrassment. There are a string of embarrassing stories regarding our first initial 'dates' but I will spare him the rest of them. And yes, I did check with him before sharing that with the blogosphere.
I want to make it known that he was a perfect gentleman the entire time. He was incredibly sweet, always opening doors and getting me little gifts. If we got to one of our houses and our parents weren't home, he wouldn't even go inside. Isn't that sweet? Very un-sixteen-year-old-boy-like. He has said that it's very strange to think that we both, unknowingly, went on our last 'first' date at 17 years old. Weird that a decision that we made SO young would impact our lives so far down the road. But it's been good.
And on top of being a fantastic 16 year old boyfriend, he's an even better husband. I am a very, very lucky girl.
