The Dating Game

Ok... I'm excited... I'm answering my first two questions from the blog below... please don't stop asking questions... I think this might be really really fun.

The first two questions I got today were from Annie at Where the Green Grass Grows. Her two questions (well the two I'm answering today) were "How did Jon & I meet?" and " Tell us one good dating story". I thought that would be a great place to start (I'm going to tell one story to answer both questions) so here we gooooo.....


Jon and I met through the Monte Vista Chapel college and young adult group called Monument. Jon was a drummer in the worship band at the time. He had long hair, he was often barefoot and he seemed to always have the worlds largest cup of coke from Carls Jr next to him. I was talking to one of my new church friends (as I had just started attending Monument) about how my opinion of Christianity was tainted by the Christians I knew. Most Christians in my opinion were judgmental and fake. I wanted a Christian friend who wasn't scared to swear in public, liked a beer once in awhile and had an actual opinion that wasn't harvested from growing up sheltered by parents and church officials who thought they were breakable.

Jon was sarcastic, competitive and he was a decent flirt. He never dressed like anyone else, he never joked around like anyone else and he was by far the most opinionated person I had ever met at church. We became friends. He ironically enough had a crush on the girl who told me about him. We were friends for several months...friends who spent every moment together, friends who knew every story, every reaction and every picky food choice. We became great friends and I expressed my desire to date him (he turned me down) and I told him I'd rather he was happy because I carried about him that much and I dropped it. We were friends for awhile and then one day we weren't friends...

Jon and I had been hanging out ALOT. I mean every day after work, every weekend, every day off, talking on the phone (even though he hates the phone), talking on the computer. We talked about everything...family, the future, food, travel, vacation, hypothetical children, God and country. One particularly low day for me Jon made a list of the things he liked about me. It was a great list. I loved it (in fact I've tried many times to get him to give it to me again but he never does...perhaps after I'm in labor he'll take pity and I'll get it one more time). I loved it because the things he loved about me where the things I thought gave me value as a person. I felt so validated. I gave him a list in return. We both spent the next few days walking on air, feeling confident.

Then he said it "any guy would be lucky to date a girl like you" and I called his bluff. If any guy would want a girl like me...why didn't he want one... I mean he was either lying about how great I was or lying to himself. And then it happened... for the first time ever the competitive, debating Jon that I loved said he was wrong. I thought "ya you're right...no one wants to date me" but he finished by saying that he should want to date me because I was a great catch. In fact, he said, he did want to date me but he thought I deserved better. To this day (and long before that moment) I knew that there wasn't any guy better for me than Jon. There were a few more talks after that one...but by the end of the next day we were dating.

We decided to not talk about the fact that we were dating with people. We just kept it very quiet. Later, we'd gradually started admiting the truth to others. Jon didn't even tell his family till he had already asked me to marry him. But that's our great dating story (at least my version... I'm sure he has his own). We had a lot of good dating memories...trips to Disneyland, trips to the Historic town near where we live, trips to the snow in the middle of the night just because we could. We went to church events, parades, movies and we played a lot of pool but nothing compares to that first list. Nothing at all...