In the Beginning...

Let's talk about how Jon and I met.

When I was 18, I trundled off to University, as many 18-year-olds do, bright-eyed and full of hope! After setting up my bedroom, my parents left and I wended my way down to the 'Welcome!' talk with another girl I'd found from my course, in the room next to me.

As we were sat at the front, another girl came over to us, two boys in tow. She briskly introduced herself, and announced that she, too, was studying English, as were her two companions. One, in a suede jacket with a slight twinge of an accent, introduced himself as Jon. I didn't see him again that evening, and he doesn't remember us even meeting then.

HE remembers us meeting the next morning when, on the advice of our Subwarden, I found myself leading a large group of people past the bus stop immediately outside of our Hall, and down to the other, quieter bus stop at the end of the road. HE spent the next week or so referring to me as "That Girl Who's Afraid Of Roads", as I was a little nervy when faced with the giant city-sized roads, which dwarfed my tiny hometown roads in comparison.

Somehow we ended up in the same group of friends. I was quite taken with him, and briefly worried that he fancied another girl more - and she'd got his phone number first! - until I found out she was a lesbian, so I could relax. Although at the time Jon did have quite long, fluffy hair, he wasn't really effeminate. Particularly not in any way that would have mattered!

You have to understand, at the time I considered myself not much of a catch. Having once sat on a bus back from a waitressing assignment and listened to two boys list the hottest girls in my school, without having realised that we knew each other at all during the 6-hour shift we'd just worked together, I think I was rather justified in assuming I was nigh-on invisible to the opposite sex. Aside from a few awkward near-encounters in high school with friends that had sent me into near-meltdown over the stress of it all.

That was another thing: I didn't know how to cope with the idea of Relationships. I wasn't by nature a socially anxious person, I've always been fairly gregarious. But the idea of that kind of Relationship was like a sucking black hole of terror, with a soundtrack of the teasing I'd occasionally get in high school if I even spoke to a boy. It was good-natured, from my friends, but always made me want to curl up into a little ball. In high school people knew I didn't do boyfriends, so attention was always immediately drawn to any interactions I had with boys.

But at University, no-one knew me! No-one knew I apparently had a crippling anxiety that sang the "Sittin' in a tree" song at me. This just left the one hurdle to overcome, which was knowing what the hell I did with myself now.

I figured he liked me back when we ended up doing a late-night group reading of some Edgar Allen Poe a couple of weeks into Uni. I'm still not sure why we were doing a reading, although I have a vague memory of it being because one of our friends hadn't done his reading for his seminar the next day, and somehow had managed to convince all of us to help him do it. This turned what should have taken half an hour to read into a two-hour long session as we passed the book round the circle and each read a paragraph, but it was fun anyway.

After that we sort of just... stumbled together rather ineptly and together we have stuck, with comparitively few meltdowns along the way. I had one briefly when I realised that all our friends knew we were in a relationship (oh hello, High School Anxieties, that's where you've been), and another when we got engaged, but otherwise we've done pretty well. We date our anniversary as 5th November, but we have no clue really, we never went on any dates (seemed pointless when to all intents and purposes we lived together). We picked the 5th for the simple reason that it meant we had a reason to go see the fireworks every year.

I've never written about this before. When we're asked how we met, we tend to say, "Same Halls, same course, same friends - it was just easier than avoiding each other!"

Which is true, but on a couple of different levels.


How did you and your SO meet?