My husband and I recently celebrated our first dozen years of wedded bliss (well, okay, mostly bliss), and as often happens in mid-August, I’ve been reflecting on us and all God has brought us through. In the twelve years of our marriage and the fourteen years we’ve known each other, we’ve mourned the loss of three grandparents, celebrated the birth of our three kids, moved twice, bought a house, endured health scares and hospitalizations, and weathered untold job changes and two massive shifts in career focus (one for each of us). God has been faithful to us, and I am blessed. Not cheap, plastic hashtag-blessed, but truly, deeply blessed. God knew us both before we were even born, and He knew just how right we were for each other.
As a romance writer, I love cooking up stories of how couples meet and how relationships bloom. I love hearing real-life stories just as much. So, on the occasion of our anniversary, I thought I’d share ours.
A little bit of back story: Despite the fact that I grew up in Kansas, I’m a die-hard New England Patriots fan. For this, I blame/thank my mother. She started rooting for the Pats back in the 1970s, when a guy named Steve Grogan was their quarterback. Grogan played college ball at Kansas State, and although K-State routinely pumps out NFL-caliber players now, back in the ‘70s, they were a laughingstock. For someone from a Kansas school to make the NFL was practically unheard of, so when Steve Grogan actually did it, my mom became a lifelong Patriots fan. She tells me that the day I was born, she held snuggly newborn me and watched the Patriots play on TV. They lost, of course, as was to be expected back then. (No one under the age of thirty believes me, but the Pats used to be terrible).
In college, my brother helped me expand my rooting interests to include another equally hapless New England area sports team: the Boston Red Sox. I didn’t know then that I was joining one of the most cursed fan bases in all of sports. I just knew that the Yankees were evil, and therefore, I must root for the Sox.
This all became very important in October, 2003, when I, six weeks into my Master’s degree at the University of Illinois, decided to skip a College of Fine Arts prayer meeting in favor of meeting a fellow Red Sox fan friend of mine at a local sports bar for a playoff watch party. This was not without guilt; I distinctly remember thinking that the fine arts prayer group was where Single, Desperate Me was most likely to come across Husband Candidates. But the husband search could wait, I decided. For that night, there was baseball.
I remember walking into O’Charley’s and spying a table full of guys, to whom my friend Eric hastily introduced me during commercial breaks. The only one that really made an impression was a guy he introduced as Cheech, who wore a Hawaiian shirt and a great smile. That impression was this: Huh. I’ve never met a real person with that name before.
During the course of the game, I chatted with most of the guys at the table, and during the conversation Cheech happened to mention that he rooted for the Pats. “Hey, me, too,” I said.
He stopped and looked at me. “Wait, you like the Pats?”
“Of course.”
“How’d you like to go to a game in November?”
I blinked. “A game? Like a real live Patriots game?”
“Yeah,” he said, with elaborate casualness. “A bunch of us are going to Indy on November 30th to see the Patriots-Colts game. I’ve got an extra ticket if you’re interested.” (I later found out this ticket was promised to a guy friend of his, who was a touch miffed when it was suddenly no longer available).
“Are you kidding?” I said. “I’d love to.”
Game day arrived, and it was a blast. The six of us (Eric, his girlfriend, another Pats fan, and a friend of Cheech’s who just wanted to see the game) all went out to lunch beforehand, and I was stunned when Cheech made the meal his treat. He also refused to let me pay him for the ticket. “Yesterday was your birthday, right?”
“Yeah…”
“Okay. Happy birthday.”
More stunned blinking.
The game was an instant classic. The Patriots had what seemed like a comfortable lead going into the fourth quarter, but as we soon found out, a comfortable lead when Peyton Manning is the opposing quarterback turns out to not be all that comfortable. The Pats held off the Colts, 38-34, thanks to a huge defensive stop on the goal line, directly below where we were sitting. I couldn’t have pictured a more perfect way to see my first Patriots game.
On the way home, Eric’s incredibly subtle girlfriend, Bethany, turned around in her seat and asked me what I was looking for in a guy. I was a little stunned at the question; while I did have three Big Huge Important Non-Negotiables for my future husband, I didn’t feel like sharing them with virtual strangers. Bethany seemed to need an answer, though, so I picked three random things I wouldn’t mind having in an eventual mate, but were definitely not dealbreakers.
“Well, I dunno…somebody who’ll bring me flowers, someone who can give a good back rub, and maybe somebody who speaks a foreign language or has an accent or something.”
Cheech grinned, shrugged, and said, “Well, I’m three for three.”
I remember sitting in the back seat thinking, No way. It cannot be this easy. I’ve been looking for The One for several years now, and there is no way he is sitting in the back seat next to me right now. No way.
But he was. And THREE FOR THREE is engraved on the inside of his wedding ring.
As an interesting aside, since Cheech and I got together, the Patriots have won four Super Bowls, and the Red Sox broke an 86-year title drought in 2004, the first World Series for which Cheech and I were a couple. For good measure, they added additional titles in 2007 and 2013.
I’m not necessarily saying that our couple-ness was the missing piece of the puzzle for two longsuffering franchises.
But it definitely doesn’t hurt.
