As you read in my first post, Stephen and I met during our undergraduate years at Ole Miss. Stephen is almost two years older than me, but our birthdays caused us to be only one year apart in school. He was a member of Delta Psi (St. Anthony Hall), a fraternity that appealed to many of my male friends from the Honors College. Stephen says we were first introduced at a bowling party his fraternity hosted prior to Rush Week, but I don't remember...I blame it on the awe of being a freshman! As is tradition in Oxford, football game weekends provided opportunity for the fraternities to host "house parties". Stephen (Stenny, as his brothers referred to him) was known as the guy with the music, so he was often visible during these events and this is when I got to know him though the majority of our early friendship was spent chatting on AOL Messenger. The first time I remember an effort to hang out was in March of my freshman year, when Stephen (and some other mutual friends) took me frog gigging. I am happy to say that we saw no frogs; I still do not know how one gigs them but I'm a little grossed out by the prospect. Being the non-outdoorsy girl I am, this should have been a sign that I was willing to do silly things to spend time with him. We became a little closer after that adventure, and I can still remember Stephen picking me up during finals week of my freshman year to get ice cream (he called it a study break).
He went home to Madison for the summer, and I stayed in Oxford to work for a summer camp at Ole Miss. I can't adequately recount Stephen's experiences over that summer, but it was a great time for me. I was busy taking classes and working with the children in my summer program, but I was also able to spend time alone. When you grow up in a small town, you have to really struggle to establish yourself as an individual. The tendency is to view a person as "_____'s daughter", "______'s friend", or "_____'s girlfriend". Moreover, people in Cleveland rarely did anything alone; even going to Wal-Mart was an event that required a group. Since we defined self-worth that way, an enormous amount of time was spend ensuring we had those ties. That summer I learned to go to a restaurant and eat alone, enjoy shopping by myself, and (my favorite) take a blanket to the park and lay there and read. Oxford in the summer is peaceful and blissfully un-crowded, which surely helped my feelings of peace. I made plans to continue being happy alone once everyone came back to school in fall, because it gave me a freedom. Despite my self-discovery journey Stephen and I continued to chat regularly, and I made plans to visit him over Independence Day weekend.
We got together with a number of our friends for the holiday, and my plan was to continue to Hattiesburg the following day to visit my friend Mimi. Stephen surprised me, though, by making it clear that he thought we should start dating. This scared me on a few levels; my experience was that friends that date unsuccessfully can never return to their previous closeness. Stephen was a dear friend to me, and I was not willing to jeopardize that. But also, my recently-recognized freedom didn't seem to align with a relationship. So I did what any scared girl does: I got in my car and ran. Bless Mimi for talking to me on the way and welcoming me to her home at 4 am! As you can imagine my friendship with Stephen changed after that night, and we didn't talk the rest of the summer. That time "apart" made me realize exactly how much Stephen meant to me, so by August I was ready to attempt dating him.
Stephen invited me over for lunch one weekend right after he moved back to Oxford, and I was happy to accept. He cooked spaghetti, which is still one of my favorite dishes that he cooks. I brought frozen garlic bread, which was one of the few things I could "cook" at that point. I burned my arm making the bread (I still have the scar!), and his roommate's girlfriend managed to shoot dirt at me from their vacuum cleaner while trying to unclog it so Stephen said, "I was pretty sure I'd never see you again!" Despite all of that, our first quasi-date was to an 80's party Stephen's fraternity hosted in Fall 2004.
After that, Stephen was my date to every football game that season. He will tell you that our first actual date was in November 2004, when he went with me to Memphis to shop for a dress to wear to his semi-formal. From there I was hooked, and we became "us". We got engaged on December 10, 2005, at the restaurant at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, and we were married on December 9, 2006.
We have been married almost five years now, and I am so thankful that I didn't stick to my stubborn plan that summer. God sent this man to be my partner, and though we are so very different we complement each other perfectly.
