So happy together: A belated Valentine post

I have a confession: I think Valentine’s Day is a dumb, fake holiday. I’ve never been the sappy type, so a day devoted to expensive gifts and red foil covered chocolate makes me want to barf. I think my husband should be sweet to me all the time, not just on one designated day a year. OK, so perhaps the day of my birth and our anniversary are exceptions to that rule; he should always be really sweet to me on those days.


This is why my super fantastic Valentine’s Day post is 5 days late. Here’s what I wrote on V-Day, but didn’t get around to posting until today:

Some experiences stick with you forever; the moment I met Adam is one of those moments for me. I still remember every vivid detail. It was the early fall of my sophomore year of college, circa 2002. My friends and I went to the University of Dayton for a party, but primarily because one of my friends was crushing hard on a guy on their football team.

I still remember what I was wearing: a horrible faux shredded jean skirt and an adorable black tulle-like tank top from Express with my favorite black platform Steve Madden sandals. My really short, really blonde hair was flipped out in my favorite wing-like pattern, which I seem to recall taking an extended amount of time to perfect.

We headed up north to Dayton and enjoyed cans of Beast before heading to a (no lie) “Mexican Prison Party” in someone’s apartment with my friend’s crush and a group of his male friends. The throwers of said party didn’t care much for us, so they continually asked us to stay in a bedroom because they were worried the noise would get them in trouble. I remember being annoyed and I remember scoping out the guy situation, that’s about it. In my mind, all I recall of Adam is that he was lounging on some sort of beanbag chair; I don’t remember thinking he was cute or fantastic. I still remember what he was wearing: a deep maroon colored t-shirt, holey jeans and sandals.

After the Prison Party was a bust, we went back to a dorm room to play drinking games with more disgusting beer. My extreme lack of a filter and searing sarcasm got the best of me and I began aiming my insults at Adam. He later told me that he thought I was a miserable human being until I caught his eye and smiled at him; which I do not recall. Then, he found me to be quite witty and charming and assumed I was hitting on him. I don’t think I was, but I don’t have the heart to dash his former hopes. He also later told me that he had an eye on one of my friends and thought I was too stuck up. It must have been my flippy hair.

As the night wore on, he and I began talking and hit it off. Our friends, in true peer pressure style, convinced me to go back with him to his dorm room. I did, and that’s when we realized one important unifying force in our soon to be relationship: Bob Seger. I remember the look on his face when, sitting on some disgusting dorm room hand-me-down sofa, I told him that the first concert I’d ever been to was Bob Seger. I fully expected him and his roommates to laugh me out the door; instead he quickly ran from the room. He returned seconds later with a handful of Bob Segar CD’s, shoving them into my lap. After asking me a few times if I had snuck into his bedroom and saw the CD’s, and made up the story to impress him (I didn’t) he began talking about his love for classic rock.

After sending me back to Cincinnati the next morning, we saw one another a handful of times before that winter. We’d only known each other for a few months, but our relationship had quickly blossomed, save one small problem: he was engineering major at the time and was headed to Washington, D.C. for a co-op for the semester. I attended his going away party (I wore a black American Eagle cable knit sweater turtleneck, in case you were wondering) and after the night had concluded, we decided that we would have a casual relationship while he was away.

That lasted roughly a month, until I called him crying and asking if he would be my boyfriend. The rest, as they say, is history. Adam proposed to me in 2006, we married in 2007 and I stopped using a curling iron to flip out my hair. That horrible jean skirt is long gone, but I still keep that Express tank top. It makes me smile every time I walk into the closet.