What Does Church, Facebook & The Presidential Debates Have In Common?

Six and a half years – that is how long Sean and I have been together.

 

I met him at church one evening, but it would be a few more months before I bumped into him again. After which, I searched him on Facebook (don’t worry, we had a mutual friend in common!) – You’ll have to read on…

 

A few unplanned meetings, a little happenstance and some facebook scoping, has led to almost 5 years of marriage and one beautiful baby.

 

I know our meet-up place sounds so boring; a lot of people meet their future spouses at church, I mean it is a good place to meet a special someone after all. But the twist is that I didn’t expect to meet a guy who also went to the same university as me – since I had personally sworn off marrying any guy from my college. They just didn’t interest me, even two years after graduating from that university, I still had no interest in dating boys from the same school. So I did the whole online dating scenario and tried to meet guys at work functions – I eventually gave up on both of those avenues.

 

During this time, I switched churches to a larger one with the hopes of meeting a guy. Yup, I honestly switched churches for that purpose, but also because life after college was challenging enough and most of my friends had moved away. I was looking for a post-college group at church, which I found one evening and I headed out by myself. Not knowing a soul, someone started talking to me and that led me to sitting with her and her friends. Eventually Sean showed up later in the evening. That was our first encounter!

 

We met that June and we didn’t see each other again until September, when we bumped into each other in between services – except I couldn’t remember that he was Sean! I knew there was a Sean in the group I met that first night but I couldn’t remember that was him. Regardless, afterwards I snooped for him on Facebook – as I mentioned, my hook was going to be: “oh I saw your profile through our mutual friend”, which was tucked away in my back pocket if I needed it. Fortunately, I didn’t. We started messaging back and forth and eventually that led to meeting up for coffee, then a movie, then watching the Presidential debates in 2008 (not the most romantic of dates).

 

The whole time we went from just hanging out to officially dating, Sean never wavered in his desire to hang out with me. He would ask me point-blank: what are you doing this evening, can we hang out? He wasn’t wishy-washy with his intentions; if we made plans he stuck to them, he showed he was interested in me and didn’t play games. That was what made him different and made him stand out in my mind. 10 months later he proposed and one year exactly after he proposed we got married. 

 

Here we are now, celebrating 5 years of marriage this summer. Along the way we have had our fair share of bumps and rocky roads; it isn’t easy sharing a life with another person so I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say that we have been on cloud 9 since day one. But I am glad that I took the chance to one night to go to a church service myself, overlook that Sean and I went to the same college and take a chance on the guy I now call my husband.

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