Entries (RSS)Today is Mr. B’s birthday, so I thought I would relate how the two of us met, for those who didn’t know us at the time. Settle in. This is gonna be a long one…and, oh yeah, I make no guarantees about interestingness. 
It all started with Rachel, though at the time she was trying to set me up with someone else. See, she was trying to convince me to come to her son’s birthday party and meet some of her friends. If I happened to be interested in anyone, she’d try to set me up with someone. Well, I wasn’t really going for the whole house full of strange people. I’m a bit of an introvert if you hadn’t guessed. Anyway, one of her guy friends asked if she knew anyone she could set him up with, and the two ideas came together. The night before the party she had me and this guy over, so she could set us up and then I’d go to the birthday party knowing someone other than Rachel. Well, this story isn’t about that other guy, so suffice it to say, that setup didn’t really work out. However, at the birthday party, I met Mr. B. Now, I didn’t think much of it cause that was still when trying to figure things out with this other guy, and Mr. B got the impression that I was kinda there with this other guy, so I guess he didn’t think much of it either.
A few weeks after that, Rachel convinced me to go to a cruise-in hosted by the car club she and her then-fiancé-now-husband are part of. At this point, there was nothing happening with guy #1, and Mr. B started talking to me, explaining some of the stuff about the cars, etc. Towards the end of the night, he headed off to the bars with a bunch of the guys and I continued hanging out with some of the people from the club. I thought Mr. B was nice enough, but we hadn’t really talked much, so again, I didn’t think much of it.
Six months later, Rachel convinced me to come hang out at a bonfire and her house with a bunch of their friends. Her son ended up being hurt while at a family member’s house and I accompanied Rachel to the emergency room, where we spent most of the night. When returning to her house, I talked with a few of the guys, since that was mostly all that was left at the time, but mostly hung out and talked to Rachel. I didn’t really talk to Mr. B much that night, but when he left, I think again to head out to the bars with some of the guys, he gave Rachel and hug and then gave me one as well. That struck me as a little odd, but Rachel said he was just friendly.
A couple weeks later, I joined a group going out for Rachel’s fiancé’s birthday. I was talking a bit with one of the guys I had talked to at the bonfire and he asked me out. I figured, “What the hell” so decided to go. Unfortunately, he asked me if I wanted to go out a couple days later, which happened to be my birthday. I told him what the day was and said it’d be OK if he wanted to go out a different time as that put some extra pressure on a first date, but he said it was fine. He came over to hang out for a little bit the next night and we talked and got to know each other. At the end of the night, we hadn’t yet made definitely plans for our date, but he said he’d call me the next day to finalize plans. Well, he never called. I eventually called him and he said he got tied up. Well, it turned into a big mess and I wrote that whole situation off.
After a few weeks, Rachel again convinced me to go to a cruise-in. Well, guy #2 was there, and it was a rather uncomfortable situation, so I hung out for a while and made my excuses. At that point, Rachel had a hard time convincing me to go to anything involving groups of her friends. About that same time, Mr. B started asking Rachel about me. However, any time she brought it up, I refused to have anything to do with him because I was worried about people thinking I was working my way through the group of friends.
About four or five months later, I found out that Rachel was trying to set up a lunch date because Mr. B was working on a contract job in the building we worked in. However, at the last minute, things fell apart and he got pulled to a job in another building.
After several more months of him asking about me, she finally convinced me to let her give him my phone number. So, about a year and a half after we first met, we finally went out on our first state. We went to Olive Garden, sat at the bar and talked for an hour or so waiting for a table, then sat at the table for a few more hours just talking. We stopped at a bar for a little bit to kill time before the movie started, then went to see 50 First Dates.
All in all, it was a good night, almost 1-1/2 years after we first met. We’ve both agreed we’d have never worked out if we had started dating when we first met. He was still partying quite a bit, and I most definitely wasn’t into that lifestyle. So we took a little longer to get together, but here we are, coming up on four years in January.
A little side note, we did have an interesting story on our first date. Since we finally went out in January, he was driving his beater car. He has a couple show cars but they, of course, aren’t used in the winter. And let me tell you, the beater car was a piece of crap. It died a couple times at stoplights because it apparently doesn’t handle cold well…yes this from the winter car. Also, when we went to leave the restaurant, I was still getting my coat and purse settled, so I wasn’t yet seat-belted in when he was first putting the car into reverse. The car jerked so hard changing gears, I almost hit my head on the dashboard. A possible concussion would have made for a good first date.
