So, a little more than twenty years ago, there was this woman I went to school with. We ran in some of the same circles. She was a computer science minor, and I think she was maybe on the newspaper with the girlfriend of one of my buddies and we were in honors together. I was a junior. I can’t remember now if she was a junior or a senior, and I lost touch with her like fifteen years ago.
Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that she started this rumor around the computer science department that I was seeing this sophomore girl. We didn’t actually know each other especially well at the time; we’d met at the department picnic the previous spring, and I’d invited her to go wander around downtown on Halloween, which was supposed to be a big group thing but everyone else had cancelled. But this preexisting rumor going around took off a lot of the pressure that historically made it very difficult for me to get up the nerve to ask a cute girl out on a date, so I asked her out on the first Friday in December. I took her to a Jane Austin movie at the Rotunda and then the Papermoon Diner on 29th street, and it was only later, at dinner, that she told me that it also happened to be her birthday. That was twenty years ago yesterday.
To quote entirely the wrong Regency-era romance novelist, Reader, I married her.