We will be married 50 years next month.

Our meet cute isn't so cute but it worked. We met on match dot com. Remarkably we lived our entire childhoods in the same exact circles. We went to the same stores, ate at the same diner counter on Sunday mornings, ice skated on the same fire department rinks, we even had people in common but he went to a different school and it just never happened. So over 20 years ago, both divorced, both a bit unsure but both wanting to find a person to be our person, we signed up for match. Our first date/meet up was at a wrestling tourney and any man who braves a gym full of wrestlers and parents just to meet me is a keeper. 

Best decision I have ever made. And here we are a lifetime later, still happy and still living life together.

My DH stood me up for a blind date.

I was set up with "the most eligable guy" in a place that was about an hour from where I lived by my friend's parents who had a vacation place on the water.  The community they lived in had a 4th of July party cruise and that was supposed to be my date with this guy.

Well..... he never showed up.  The next day the girls did a fishing charter and we had lots of fun, beer, etc.. and one of the mates heard us talking about Mr. Stand UP.  Turns out.. he knew him.. and called him and told him that he was an idiot for not showing up the night before.. the girl was pretty.. fun.. liked to drink a beer.  

So, as we were hanging back at the friend's house.. Mr. Stand Up and his friend show up.. he borrows one of the jet skis and takes me out for a ride.. all the way out around a light house ... and he said he never got told about the date.. haha (possible.. but  i also know he was not a huge fan of the cruise boat owner since they had some conflicting business dealings in the past.. so.. who knows). 

He was getting ready to deliver a ferry boat from the east coast down to Mississippi.. and we ended up talking daily while he was gone for over a month.. when he came back.. we eventually started dating.. then living together.. running a cruise boat business together and were married about 3 years to the day (I was NOT rushing it...lol).

I still tell people he stood me up for my first date.

I was working in Marseille as an English language assistant in a secondary school. During the weekends I went to work in a family hotel in the Alps (they were my second family). All in all, I worked 3 summer seasons and one winter there. Anyway, the boss didn't like me taking the train back to the city (the station at 10-11 pm on a Sunday evening was populated by an unsavoury fauna and it was a 5 hour trip so I wasn't really up to dealing with any nonsense after a hard weekend's work) so, every week, he tried to find me a ride back to the city with people he knew and trusted. I still had the return part to my ticket at the end of the season.

So on 13th March, it was DH. He took me back to my appartùment, I served him a coffee and he invited me to dinner on the Tuesday 13th March. I countered the invitation by saying OK, but dinner will be here and I'll be cooking. Tuesday arrived we had dinner and he never left.

This was in 1983 ...

To someplace you both enjoy.  Go ghost hunting?. Or one of those walks where you stop at different restaurants and get a bit to eat at each restaurants. What that restaurant is famous for?  Something fun. Wine flight  

We met online. We had a lot in common with being active and wanting adventure. I asked him if he wanted to go to indoor rock climbing on our first date. He ended up showing off and lead climbing on the tall indoor ceiling cave. I called him Spiderman.. Climbing on the ceiling. Came to find out later he was an Olympic level rock climber in the late 90s ;) 

Aww. It's nice to see another side of the story. It makes sense that we would post about problems/issues here to get advice, but now I see the side that makes it all worth while. I wanted to share my proposal story. We had been together for 4.5 years, and had pretty much known from the beginning that we wanted to spend forever together in some capacity, most likely in marriage. One Sunday morning at church, I kept thinking about my future with dh. When I got home, I asked him where he was in his thinking about our future together. He looked a little agitated for a moment, and muttered, "you want to know about our future?" Then he went upstairs. I kind of knew but was confused what he was up to. He came downstairs with a ring and went down on one knee. He had planned to propose on a trip we planned for a few weeks after. But he decided just to do it then. We happened to have sparkling wine. We toasted, sipped on that, and danced to a play list he had made for the occasion with romantic, not too corny love songs. We laughed, cried, danced, laughed and talked about our past and future. It still brings tears to my eyes thinking about that day. When we went on our trip, he pointed out to me the places he had planned to walk me through and where he would have proposed to me. We really liked how the proposal actually went though because we both wanted the same thing. It wasn't just his idea.

It was his first night out after kicking toxic troll out. We made out like teenagers, and became friends for a little over a year.

I told him one night "hey I love you, do you love me? Ok, then lets do this!"

We had been living together for a couple of years with massive ups and downs due to the step situation and BM, not to mention my deadbeat ex.  We had a nice rental house and my bio kids were finally in a great school district after a tumultuous few years since my divorce   (DS actually attended a different school for his first four years).  It was a very tumultuous period - I went back to work for awhile, left DH one weekend, was insanely jealous of BM, especially with him running over there on our first Christmas morning then later buying her a car (a Pinto). He seemed to be avoiding marriage.

I can't remember where things turned around but we decided to buy a house and get married.  I couldn't face the idea of a family wedding with all the upset and 3 wild SKs so we eloped to Las Vegas and were married at the courthouse.  Silly me, I took ID for both of us but in LV, no blood tests, no ID, I could have said my name was Minnie Mouse.

When we got home, we learned that SDthen12 had run away.  A harbinger of the future where she could make any occasion worse.

Fifty years later, as of next month, we are still in our house which has turned out to be an expando-house morphing for numerous situations.  We are still healthy at 79 and 86, our 5 kids are all doing their thing and all still speaking to us.  Lol.  We're lucky.

DH and I met (reluctantly) through a mutual friend who thought we'd be perfect for each other. I was perfectly fine single. DH was perfectly fine single. But she persisted, we both rolled our eyes, and finally agreed to a coffee date. It went very well, and DH said he'd call me. Alas, DH has zero game and didn't get my number. I didn't worry about it- he'd figure it out if he wanted to. He did.

We were engaged 8 months later, and married 11 months after that. 

Twelve years later, we still laugh about how he has no game. 
 

We belonged to the same professional organization, worked together on a project (and I misspelled his name, discovered only AFTER it went to print). He said he fell in love with me over the phone.

We were the cutest conference couple for years, didn't marry until our youngest kids were out of high school. He proposed to me probably fifty times. Finally wore me down on New Year's Eve. I like bubbly just a little too much I guess.