[All photos from Unsplash]

This post is the first scene in the serialized publications of my falling-in-love memoir. Enjoy! There’s much, much, MUCH more to come.

I have a lot of my mind when I meet you. I have just moved to Colorado, and I find myself being set up with an old roommate of yours, mostly because I am desperate for friends – and a boyfriend, if I’m going to be honest. Which I am.

The date was Aunt Jeanne’s idea. She’s my mother’s identical twin, and even into their 50s, the resemblance is uncanny. The twins cannot even tell their own voices apart on an answering machine.

“Liz, he’s around your age, smart, Christian, and handsome! Don’t you think Ron?” she said.

My uncle answered, “Well, don’t ask me.”

“Anyway, I don’t think he’s seeing anyone,” she says.

My uncle interjects that I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to, and that I can tell my aunt what I really think. “It’d be good for her,” he says. She shoves him.

But I consent to the date. What do I have to lose? Now, the blind date is sitting beside me, a tall red-head, from whom I might hope for another date if it weren’t for the gaggle of roommates he’s brought with him: safety in numbers, you know. You can never be too careful with all these marriage-hungry Christian ladies prowling around. It is just so easy for them to get the wrong idea. They might trap you into marrying them, and then where would you be?

Anyway, he took me to a church service for young Christians, which made me cringe  because the entire auditorium is filled with women who appear to have stepped straight out of an Anthropologie catalog, the type of women who actually look attractive in winter coats. Which, by the way, I do not, which is beside the point (though not to me). Let’s just say, I would not have minded if he had taken me to any chain restaurant and bought me a plate of spaghetti. At least then, I would have felt like that extra appliance of chap stick in the car before I walked inside had been worth it.

He sits next to me and I do not remember him asking many questions, though we must have talked.

“What are you doing here?” he might have asked.

To which I would have replied, “I have no idea. I’ve asked God that question many times without receiving a satisfactory reply.”

“No, what is your job?” would have been his rejoinder.

“Oh,  I’m an unpaid intern.”

“Where is your internship?”

“Do you really care?”

“I asked the question, didn’t I?”

“Sorry for being so surly.”

“This is exactly why these guys (gesture to the roommates) came with me.”

“I don’t blame you.”

This is the beginning of the serial publications of my falling-in-love memoir, about the anguished, beautiful, and spiritual way that my husband and I met, fell in love, and married.

Read the next in the series.

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