Well, I had to make my story short, and I always meant to come back and elaborate. Here's the longer version...
I first met Julie at a dance in High School; I think this particular dance was in Conroe, TX, but I might be mistaken about that. I got around to a lot of dance venues in high school...
She wore a blue dress, I remember. I asked her to dance to "Blue Monday" by New Order, only it might possibly have been "True Faith" instead. They also played "Bizarre Love Triangle" but I danced that one with someone else. Despite a little bit of vagueness on exactly which New Order song we danced to, I remember the instant very well. My father had been hanging around earlier in the building and had pointed her out to me. My dad's got a good eye.
Julie, on the other hand, doesn't remember that incident at all. She doesn't remember me until nearly six months later, at a summer youth "camp" dealie we had at Camp Strake (in the woods sorta near Houston) in the cabins. And even then, the only reason she paid any attention to me was because her younger sister Kristen had somehow developed this crazy crush on me. Now, Kristen is nice enough and all that, but I was a few weeks away from being a senior, and she was only a freshman, so I didn't really consider her as viable dating material. Julie, on the other hand, I still quite liked. However, it took the intervention of my nosy little sister Samantha to make anything happen. She led me to believe that Julie was interested in my asking her out, when in actuality she had said no such thing, while simultaneously leading Julie to believe I was interested in going with her to the yearly Sadie Hawkins (girl's choice) dance.
Despite this rather shaky begining, I asked her to the Valentine's Dance at my school, and she asked me to the (March) Sadie Hawkins dance at hers, and following that, we continued to date, mostly for fun, on and off until January, when I went to Argentina for two years. While I was there, she also left home to go to school in Idaho, of all places, although we did continue to write each other from time to time.
Now, I wrote a fair amount of girls while I was in Argentina, but Julie was the only one (besides my sister and my mother) that I was still writing by the end of my stay there. See, although in general I was very much against the whole "love at first sight" paradigm, I had always liked Julie, and I think somehow, deep down, way inside, I loved her from the very beginning. But I wasn't quite ready to admit that to myself yet; and besides, she was still out of state when I got back that January. In fact, I even went out a few times with her younger sister Kristen, who was a senior in High School, and still too young for me, but not by nearly as much anymore. Besides, by that point, our relationship had changed considerably too; we were more like good friends, or even older brother-younger sister in many ways. When Julie did get back into town that summer, having run out of courses that her junior college would teach her, we started going out again. By this time, we were both embarking on degrees at Texas A&M University, and we saw a lot more of each other. When I first saw her after her return, I think my first reaction was something like, "Wow, you're so spectactularly beautiful." Her first reaction was something like, "Where'd you get those scars all over your face?" (as a brief aside, I was riding a bike in Argentina when the front wheel broke off. As I was going downhill very fast on a dirt road at the time, I did this massive faceplant when that happened, shattering my glasses and putting some pretty serious cuts all over my face. I didn't even count the stitches I got; I must have had somewhere between 30-40 at least, plus a skin graft; they took a small strip of skin from behind my ear and sewed it in place on my upper cheek where the skin had essentially been gouged out by the glass. Since this had happened less than a year before I saw Julie again, they were still very noticable. Nowadays most people don't notice the scars at all unless I mention them.)
So anyway, she seemed interested in going out again, but this time it was her sister that did the fixing up. I was a bit hesitant because she had this boyfriend. He was a bit out of touch, and would be for some time, but apparently they were pretty serious. He had even proposed to her, although she had told him to wait until he was back home again to do that, and she thought, at least at one point, that she was going to marry this guy.
Luckily, though, I conveniently arrived when he was unavailable to put up much of a fight, so after a few dates with me, he was further and further from her mind. She still wasn't too sure of me, though -- there was at least one other guy she considered who was also hot on her heels, but persistence and local presence paid off; she finally decided to cut her strings with everyone else and date me. About that time, we reserved a wedding venue. A month or two later, over the Thanksgiving holidays, we officially got engaged.
After that, we had to be engaged for something like seven months, which really sucks. If I could do it over again, I'd make that a lot shorter. In early June, 1994, we got married in Salt Lake City.
But the big finish was when he pronounced us "man and wife", quickly followed by (in a thick, thick southern accent), "And God bless y'all real, real good!"
