What Happened Before Your First Date? – Bloggin’ on the ETC [NERD LURVE WEEK]

I’ve talked quite a bit about the many things that happened after my first official date with CH. But in the lead up to Valentine’s Day, I’d like to talk about the stuff that happened before the Friday we went out to dinner six and a half years ago:

1) We met at a dive-bar birthday party for a fellow Derby Doll. I had to drag myself to this party, and it was my third event of the night. I didn’t notice him, until I ran into him and one of his best friends while buying a drink at the bar. The best friend casually introduced us after I said, “Hey, Bitchy [his derby name was Bitchy Kitten — don’t ask], how’s it going?” But later CH told me that he noticed me right away that night. “I saw you smiling from across the room.”

2) We were in the same place without knowing it twice before that night. While I was at CMU, he did a special guest-teach of my Camera Lab class. I decided to skip that day, because “some lighting guy” was coming in to teach it. And the summer before that, we were at the same premiere for THE COUNTRY BEARS. Me as the plus one of a Disney executive friend, and him working behind the scenes.

3) I’d been planning to attend a party  thrown at his house the summer before we met — mutual friends from the Derby Doll world had invited me — but I got into a huge fight with my then-boyfriend and didn’t end up making it out.

4) The day before the night I met him, I interviewed to housesit for a lighting designer named Manny, who I knew through Carnegie Mellon’s alumnae network. He mentioned CH, because my future husband had been the most recent occupant of the guest room I’d be staying in — CH stayed with him and his wife while his house got remodeled. The only reason CH and I really began talking that night was because I asked if all lighting designers knew each other. He said, “Maybe, do you know any lighting designers?” I threw out Manny’s name, and he said that they were very good friends. I pretended not to believe him, because that’s my idea of flirting. We ended up talking for the rest of my time at the party, and Manny stood up for us at our wedding two and a half years later.

5) Though we talked for over an hour, he didn’t ask me out until seven months later for various good reasons that I won’t go into here. But this was the first time this had ever happened to me. Being an introvert, I’m great at one-on-one conversation, and I kept waiting for the inevitable “Hey, can I have your number?” close. I still remember awkwardly extracting myself from the conversation, because I finally realized he wasn’t going to ask me for it. “Um, I should say goodbye to Myna (the birthday girl), it was really nice meeting you…” Two months later, I took a three month break from dating. If he had asked me for my number when we first met, we most likely wouldn’t have dated very long. I really needed that break. Timing really is everything.

6) I got a shocking amount of stuff done during my dating break. I threw away my television, had two plays produced, wrote a couple rough drafts of screen plays, decided that 32 CANDLES would make a better novel than a screenplay. I also got a day job with insurance and my own studio apartment, and I bought my first non-beater car. 2005 was the first year of my adult life that I didn’t have to borrow money from anybody. I had gotten my life so in order that I decided to move to Chicago about a month after my dating break ended.

7) While I was telling my sister, who lived near Chicago at the time about my decision, I checked my rarely used Derby Dolly account and found an email from CH, asking if I wanted to go out.

8) He addressed me as “Kid” in the email, because my derby name was Kid Vicious. He didn’t find out my real name until the night of our first official date.

So that’s my”before our first date” story. What happened to you and your significant other before your first date? Let us know in the comments.

P.S. – If you love the locket in the featured image as much as I do, go to Missy Kulik’s sugarcookie Etsy shop and buy one for yourself or your sweetie for $24.