A Little History....

I'm such a sucker for the fast love stories where people meet, fall madly in love, and are married within a year. Love it. However, if these stories were of the hot and heavy variety(that everyone loves, of course) , the Luke and Jen saga is more of a slow-cooker romance. (And we do love us some crock pots, let me tell you.)

My memory is foggy, but I'm thinking we slowly became buddies around the mature age of 13. Now, we all remember middle school relationships. You hold hands. You don't meet outside of school. Maybe MSN messenger. You tell your friends that you "like" someone, but never to their face....You know the rules. So this Lucas kid started to move in that direction, and I shot him down. Repeatedly. I loved him as a friend, but I thought "dating" was terrifying.  Just leave me to read books with my fellow nerdettes, please.

 

 

(I excavated this image from our earliest years....debating burying it deep deep deep in the unorganized picture file. Puke.)

Still here?  I'm feeling uncomfortable thinking about the awkwardest years too, so lets move this thing along. 

So Luke and Jen remained friends, but Luke never gave up on the dating idea. Never.  He was always too nice, always too helpful, always writing me cute notes. Now, brace yourselves for the sweetest dating story ever: At my wits end of telling him "No...I really don't want to date" and ranting to my gal pals, they finally came up with a no-fail solution - "Just date him for a week, and then you can break up with him and tell him it's not going to work.  Then at least you've tried." OKAY so that's what I did.  Now how's that for sentimental and heart-touching?  We made it official right before we both turned 15.

And the rest, I'll sum up with the help of some photographic evidence:

 

We rode in tiny elevators in France together (with Isaac, of course.) 

 

We went on an awful band trip together. 

  

We shared friends together (clearly Luke had wayyyy too much influence in this relationship, ugh.)

  

 And, against the better judgement of....mostly everyone, we headed to college together.  Yeah, we could have "done our own thing" during those years, but after he saved my butt on numerous art projects, doctored my finger when I stabbed it with a chisel (Shudder. The decision to switch from Art Ed was swift and easy after that.), and put up with the 1000 other "I'm never going to survivvveee this papppperrrr!" meltdowns, I knew we had made the right choice to stick together.  Luke's name really should have been penciled in with mine on the old diploma. 

So anyways, first few years of schoolio were great, made good friends, kept the Pizza Roll factory in business, and we were making some progress on those degrees.  Yes, we were 19, but marriage came up regularly in conversation, and we came to the conclusion that we would definitely stay together, and we were living in the same town already, so why not make this official?

I remember one of my friends asking me in our 9:00 pm drawing class, "Okay, so if Luke asked you to marry him RIGHT NOW, what would you say?" To which I would replied, "Well....I would say yes." My friend was completely disgusted that I was one of those weirdos that would dare to get married before getting the career and the rest of life figured out, which obviously bugged me a teeny bit as well.  Anyways, SHOUT OUT to anyone who took the leap and just got married before all your little life ducks were in a row.  C'est pas easy.

Moving on...so the marriage talk continued, and one day in December, we headed to our usual haunt in the back corner of a cafe/sammich place in town.  Luke is a fidgeter, so I didn't think anything of it when he asked to see my little ring that he made me in high school, so he could clean it (tricky to explain but...it was a pretty ornate little thing with lots of spaces for dirt and whatevs to get it. Yeah, that sounds gross, but you know what I mean!). We kept chatting and eating those yummy sammies, and when we were ready to go, I asked for my ring back.  He stuck my engagement ring on my finger instead, and we were officially engaged right there in a coffee shop.

(Luke has never made this face before or since. Life's little mysteries...) 

Our engagement lasted for a year and a half, but it honestly flew by while we were in school, and about 6 months out I felt like a complete psycho (sound familiar??) trying to get everything ready.  But it all turned out perfectly, and I was so happy to have all our beautiful friends and family there with us.

Obviously we're missing the beach-friendly genes, so we went to Montreal for le honeymoon.  It was beautiful, and you can't beat going to Europe Jr. without paying for the overseas airfare prices. Winners!

And here we are now.  Maybe a little less awkward on the outside than when we met, but I'm so thankful I found someone who loves my hermit-y self and has makes me laugh out loud every day.  As much as I worry about how I don't have a hot-shot job yet and we don't know when we'll be able to afford this or that,writing this out has made me remember the times when all I wanted was for us to just be married.  And now I'm married to my best friend! And we're renting a really cute house! And we have an adolescent dog who I occasionally want to set free, but I guess I love him too.  I'm so looking forward to where we'll be in the next 10 years. 

Luke is now busy working on an extravagant chicken coop that he designed himself (of course. his worst quality - being good at everything.), but I'm going to stop him so we can see if beer can chicken is worth all the hype.  I'll keep you in suspense without my verdict until we meet again. Ciao!