Monday Memories 05.01.06

Today my daughter asked me about my first date with her father. Although we're divorced, we're good friends and the memory is a great one. When I first met him, I was with my friend Kris who had a pretty strong crush on him. I even tried to set them up, thinking I was doing her a favor. The first time I laid eyes on him, I thought I would never go out with someone who looked like him. You see, back in the day he was an extremely handsome young man. So much so that in our younger years, even other men would come to me and say, "Wow Steph. Your husband is a good looking man!" I assumed that someone who looked as good as he did would be cocky and shallow. I can see so clearly how he looked back then.
I was supposed to have a date with his twin brother (actually, his triplet brother - they also have a triplet sister). But when his brother came to see me in San Diego (where I was in college at the time), he brought him with him and as they say...the rest is history. His brother didn't care that we hit it off so well, in fact he was engaged to someone else and had plans to cheat on her by coming to see me. Obviously I had no guilt about liking his brother. My friend Kris knew we had a strong connection and encouraged me to go out with him - she was later a bridesmaid in our wedding. :)
I remember him walking into the room on that night, and as soon as we saw each other, we were inseparable. He asked me out for later in the week and he again came to San Diego. I had a convertible and offered to drive. I wanted to show him the best of San Diego and took him to La Jolla with the top down. We went to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch - this was 1989, so that was still a novelty. Since I drove, he had just taken some money out of his wallet and gotten in my car, leaving his wallet in his truck. During lunch I learned that the person I assumed was stuck up was actually so down to earth. He told me about his family with seven kids (!), and his bond with them was touching. He was the exact opposite of what I expected just by looking at him. At the end of lunch, it turned out that he hadn't taken enough money out of his wallet to pay for lunch. He had to admit that he didn't have enough money (and had also left his credit cards in his wallet back at my house) so I left him at the restaurant while I ran around La Jolla looking for an ATM so we could pay for lunch. How embarrassing that must have been for him! But he handled it with class and humor. We then went to another restaurant/bar where we had some margaritas and then I took him to the cliffs in Solana Beach - the best place in San Diego County to watch the sunset. After that we were inseparable. He lived in Orange County, where we both grew up, so he was an hour away, but every night from then on he drove to San Diego after work. We were married a year and a half later.
Even though we're divorced now, for a variety of reasons, we both look back on those days with fondness. We were very young - only 22 - and stupid. We had no idea what it took to have a successful marriage. Neither one of us had seen a good model of marriage growing up. But mostly we look back in fondness because we know we were madly in love. Yes, we know the beauty that came from our marriage - I'm convinced that we never regret that which leads to the birth of our children - but it was more than that. It was young love and idealism at it's finest.
We've grown up so much since then. We've been apart for almost ten years, he's married to someone else (who is exponentially a better fit for him than I ever was), and we still maintain love and respect for each other that allows us nothing but sweet memories.