And To Think It All Began With A Blind Date

Valentine’s Day is a week away and it has me thinking about my sweetheart. (Incidentally Adam hates Valentine’s Day.) Adam and I met towards the end of our freshman year in college. We met on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend. Only it wasn’t supposed to be a blind date. The student council was promoting a Sadie Hawkins style date night (girls were encouraged to ask out the guys) and my friend suggested that she and I take out a guy that she knew. Little did Adam and I know that we were being cleverly set up (our friend called me minutes before the start of the date to say that she was on the other side of town and wouldn’t make it back in time). Adam, being that gentleman that he is, agreed to go ahead with evening. He figured he had already taken the night off from work and he might as well enjoy the evening…plus, it wouldn’t cost him anything! Adam put up with me and the couple with whom we were double dating (a different friend of mine and her date). We took an evening carriage ride up and down Michigan Avenue (downtown Chicago) and afterwards we stopped for coffee. We returned to campus, said ‘goodnight’ and casually parted ways. When I stepped off the elevator in my dorm my sneaky friend was waiting up to hear all the details.

I never imagined meeting my future husband on a blind date. I always thought that I would have to know someone a long time before falling in love. The truth is that we didn’t exactly fall in love right away. The following day my date from the night before did not recognize me as I walked past him in the cafeteria. I was walking side by side with our mutual friend and Adam stopped to say ‘hi’ to her but he totally and completely ignored me! Our relationship would have ended there if our mutual (and sneaky and persistent) friend had not insisted that there be a second date. The short story is that Adam typed up a very nice note thanking me for our blind date. I never received the original thank you note because it got lost in the campus mail system. Nearly a week later I received a second draft. Probably out of politeness Adam had written that he would be willing to go out again. I took that as an invitation to call him and accept a second date. That very night we had our first real date. And the rest, as they say, is history.