Love At First Sight :)

Eighteen years ago, I was working in the drive up window at a bank and turned around to look behind me across the lobby and determine if there were cars wrapped around the building. There were - I could see the line through the window on the opposite wall from me. As I glanced that quickly toward the window over the full lobby, I spotted a pair of startlingly gorgeous crystal blue eyes. I turned back and resumed my work immediately, but my mind was racing.

"That's him! I love him! That's the man I am going to marry! That’s him! That’s him! I love him!"

I mentally chided myself for having this bizarre reaction to a pair of eyes in a crowded room I wasn’t even facing. I would never see the man again, let alone meet him right in the middle of a busy work day. Against all odds, minutes later, my coworker/friend Becky said, "Lynn. There is someone I'd like you to meet." I turned around, and it was the owner of the brilliant blue eyes!

Becky continued, "Lynn, this is Chris. I believe he will be attending the same college as you this fall." I told them that that was impossible... the college I would be attending was a tiny college that nobody really ever heard of. lol But nope, he was going to go to the same place! I couldn't even remember his face after that interaction, it was all so strange. I knew he had dazzling blue eyes, and I thought he was either bald or had brown hair. (Both! ha!) I went right home and told my baby sister that I met this man today and had this strange love at first sight reaction, and wouldn't it be funny if I end up marrying him?

College was still months away. I ended up forgetting about that incident, because I became an aunt for the first time. Somewhere that summer, I had a dream that I'd met the man I was going to marry. He was in black pants and a blue shirt (deeper… not light, but still kind of bright). I couldn't see his face, but the outfit stayed with me. I told my sister about that dream, too.

Fast-forward to orientation at our wee little college. I was up at the piano before it began, playing and enjoying myself. How often do you get to play a baby grand? My baby sister was on the bench beside me. She wasn’t attending, being in high school, but she was there for orientation and moving in. The guy from the bank walked in and I pointed him out. I didn’t think about or mention marriage. It was sort of an ‘Oh, look! There's that guy I met at work that day’ thing.

When it was almost time for orientation to start, we went to sit down in our pew. The man and the friend he was with had chosen the pew right behind us. I said hi, but not much else. Halfway through orientation, it hit me! He was wearing the blue shirt and black pants! lol I slapped my sister hard on the leg and mouthed, "Look at what he is wearing!" We were both so shocked!

That afternoon in the dorm, I told the other girls I was rooming with about meeting Chris, about the dream, and about him showing up to orientation wearing *the outfit*.

“You're not going to believe this, but I think that's the man I am going to marry! Haha”

I was a full-time student of the college. Chris was part time. He showed up every night to watch videos of the classes taped that day and do his work in the library. I held off going in there, but I did peek in from the hallway a time or two, telling various people that I was going to marry him.

One reason I held off going in to see him was because I worked at Arby's at the time. I came home every day smelling of grease. I didn’t want to talk to him smelling like food. I also had to work up the guts, if I am being honest. lol

One day, I was *finally* ready. I came home from work and showered/changed. I had to put together a bulletin board across the street in a classroom. (I was studying early childhood education). I knew that Chris generally showed up to pick up his tapes down the hall from where I would be, so I was mentally ready to see him when he came in. I couldn’t exactly think of how to “do it”, though. Do I just pop out and say hi? I was nervous.

I was almost done decorating my bulletin board when Chris came by. I waited until I heard the doors down the hall, and stepped out. I tentatively called out my friends’ names. “Is it you?” I knew better, but again… I had no real idea of how to actually approach him and say hi. It seems so farcical now, looking back!

Chris stepped out into the hall, and we began to chat. For him, this was just a conversation. For me, *if* I was going to somehow end up marrying this guy, I needed to know who in the world he was and what he believed! (That’s what happens when you are a preacher’s kid!) We covered a range of topics. I quizzed him on his thoughts about many things. I would call that our ice breaker conversation. It was certainly our first full conversation. 

The next day was mid-week services at church, so I asked him if he would like to come. He said no, that he would probably be too busy. However, the next day, he showed up dressed for church. I stopped by the library to see him, bringing him a bowl of soup for dinner. He ate, and then we walked across the road to go to church. As we crossed, a car passed, and a man gawked at us – HARD! We got into the church and sat down, still chatting. Before long, the man from the parking lot rushed up to us.

“Is this a case of boy meets girl and the rest is history?”, he asked with a huge grin spreading across his face.

“No. No, we’ve known each other for…”

We stopped and laughed. Here it felt like we’d known each other forever, but the truth is that we had only begun talking in earnest the day before! LOL The man guffawed, and said, “Well, invite me to the wedding! I give good gifts!”

Our romance was a quick one. Outside of structuring how I was ready to *finally* actually get brave enough to talk to Chris, everything from that point was organic. We got together with friends, we got together with my family. We met at a restaurant – baby sister in tow. It isn’t a secret that I fell in love with him (truly this time) SO deeply, SO hard, SO quickly! Somewhere in there, we took a selfie (our first ever) on my dad’s computer. You can see how far gone I was. LOL

Twenty-seven days after that first mid-September day when I stopped Chris by the classrooms so we could talk, he proposed to me. He didn’t have a ring. He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t even drop to one knee. I think he asked the second it dawned on him that he wanted to marry me. lol We were seated in the library where he was working, and he suddenly looked incredibly vulnerable. His eyes widened and he whispered,

“Will you marry me?”

Shocked, I asked, “What?!?!”

This time, he did slide off of the chair to one knee. We were very strict about not being in each other’s personal space at that time, so he didn’t as much as hold my hand. He crossed his hands over his knee, and asked again.

I know that I said yes, I just don’t remember actually doing it. lol Again, we were still very chaste at that time, so there was no kiss or hug that followed. There was just extreme joy! We were over the moon! lol About a few minutes later, I got a phone call from the bank I had applied to with the offer of the job I coveted. We had such a laugh about that. What a great night!

Chris and I decided that, since our engagement had come so quickly, we wouldn’t tell anyone until Chris had had a chance to talk with my dad about it. That was going to take a week. Oh my soul, how hard it would be to keep that secret!! lol I had taken a lot of flack from my roommates for not going to the college function with them that night, but when they returned I am sure I was positively glowing! They asked why I was so happy and I said, “I GOT THE JOB!” lol Indeed, that *was* the truth! It helped cover the even bigger reason for my exuberance nicely.

The next morning, I got to class early and told my favorite teacher – Mrs. Brown – what had happened. She is the only soul I spoke to before our family found out. Chris and I took turns telling our loved ones that we were getting married. We were absolutely positive that the minuscule 27 days between meeting and engagement meant that people would be shocked, but nobody was! lol Our parents, least of all! They had the same reaction across the board, “We were wondering when this would happen!” Our friends, too, were not even remotely surprised. There were, I think, only two people out of everyone who knew us who seemed even slightly surprised. Lol

Chris and I looked back at those 27 days and realized a pattern. The first week, we were acquaintances getting to know one another. By the second week we were friends. By week three, we were fully in love, and we became engaged in the fourth week of getting to know one another. We began to talk on September 18^th and were engaged on October 15^th. Our wedding was around eleven months later.

Today we are just over two months away from our seventeenth wedding anniversary. Sometimes I look back in my mind at that first day in the bank, when spotting a stunning pair of blue eyes across a crowded room sent my mind and heart into the flutter of, “That’s him! That’s the man I am going to marry!” I never thought anything would come of it, and yet, we have already spent almost two decades together. Sometimes I am just as gone about this man as I was the day he proposed. The rest of the time, I am even more deeply in love with him than that. That was, after all, “love light”. 

We have built eighteen years of friendship, love, companionship, and walking life’s journey on top of those early days. Time tests all love, and ours has withstood some truly painful things. Maybe you would call what happened with me the day I met Chris ‘love at first sight’. Maybe you could call it ‘soul recognition’. For whatever reason, my immediate instincts about him have proven to be right. I couldn’t be more pleased. He is a beautiful soul. He is my “for better or worse” and I am his. <3