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: Magic Cookie

A tale of two geeks

JW and I met in the spring of our senior year of high school. We had both come off bad breakups and ended up in the same tattoo shop one night. JW's friends had convinced him that this was how he would get over her. It started out as a joke, but as they got more drunk, they started believing they were serious. I had made my own way there, sober but hurting.

The first sentence is true. If the rest were too, I would have chosen a different title. We were both in Washington, D.C. for the National Young Leaders Conference, a week of meeting our representatives and participating in a mock Congress. JW was the majority whip, I was Speaker of the House. It was love at first sight.

"Love at first sight" sounded appropriate there. Like at first sight is more accurate. Or maybe indifference at first sight, leading to friendliness. He had a girlfriend; one of my new best friends who I met that week was hopelessly in love with him; I ran interference. When she started to throw herself at him, I reined her in. He was grateful. (When I got to know him better, I realized that it didn't matter that he had a girlfriend. Aggressive female attention induces a flight response in JW, or at least it did back when he was young and innocent.)

We kept in touch. Why did we keep in touch? We had each bonded more with other people than with each other. (One guy I bonded with became a movie star! But that wasn't the one I married. And he probably wouldn't remember me now.) We kept in touch because -- here is the truly geeky part -- we were the only ones who had email. It was 1995. Email was still a novelty. So I have AOL partly to thank for my eventual marriage.

We chatted online about our college search. I bemoaned my fate, waitlisted at both Harvard and Yale. He tapped me on the shoulder at a reception during Brown's pre-college weekend. Apparently I had been so wrapped up in my waitlist despondency that I had forgotten to mention I applied there. After that visit, I removed myself from both waitlists. (Which made my mother cry. Not that JW had anything to do with either the removal or the crying.)

Freshman year we lived down the hall from each other. We hung out once in a while. I met the girlfriend and thought her jeans were too tight. He broke up with her at the end of the year. Sophomore year he decided to become a computer science major and we started spending lots and lots of time together. Fall semester I was his TA in the intro CS class, and spring semester we were both TAs for the same class. I kept denying in vain, to my roommate, that I liked him. She said he followed me around like a lost puppy. I asked if he wanted to live together over the summer, in a big house with three other people. Within two weeks of moving in, we were dating. Good thing, too, because there were termites in the basement where he was supposed to be sleeping.

After graduation, I moved to San Francisco and he moved to New York. Then he moved to San Francisco. Then we both moved to Massachusetts, got engaged, got married in the university chapel, bought a house, had a kid. Now we're in our thirties. I was sixteen when we met and had just turned nineteen when we started dating. We've grown up together.

Full post as published by Magic Cookie on May 20, 2008 (boomark / email).