On This Day In History

Preppy Girl has a fairly accurate account of what went down between us that set up our first date 10 years ago.

I can tell you we've also been through:

• One presidential impeachment.
• One horrific attack on New York City.
• Elian Gonzalez's brief stay in the United States.
• Encounters with Richard Simmons and Scut Farkas.
• About one thousand arguments (the last one was about answering telephones).
• A decade long journey to get to a fairly comfortable place in our life together.

On March 12, 1998, PGirl came down to the production office where we worked to meet up with me for our date. In tow, was our future neighbor Sylvia (I thought she'd been brought along as insurance of some sort) who soon excused herself. I was probably wearing blue jeans and an oxford shirt. She was wearing a short, black skirt and a multi-paneled, short sleeved sweater (the pattern reminded me of the Partridge Family bus, and she had one with blue and another in green).

We walked to our destination, Dicey Riley's, an honest to goodness Irish pub in Fort Lauderdale. We drank, we smoked and we talked for a few hours. We shared divorce stories from our families and discovered that her father and my stepfather had grown up twenty miles from each other. I'd even traveled within miles of her hometown when I was a teen (we might have seen one another at the mall).

Two long years had passed since my last serious relationship had ended and my bastard period went into effect. Was I looking for the one? Sure. But there was no pressure with PGirl (from her or myself). Things just went easy from the first date. We kissed in the parking lot and parted ways. Within a few days we went from a first drink, to lap-sitting on the second date to meeting my future mother-in-law by date 3 (on St. Patrick's Day). By December we were shacking up and by the following August, we were engaged. We moved fast, but it was the right kind of speed. It was right.

It still is.

You make me a better person every day.