CFB Trenton: I was a journalist, and had just flown back from Alert and Resolute on a groaning Hercules... hours on a webbing seat in a barely insulated cabin. She was there to meet someone else.

Mike-and so what happened? How did you get together?

51 years ago , I went to a dance with crazy brother-in-law to be and came home with CrazyDad. And as they say, the rest is history.

A convention...

pen pal club

 University

We were introduced. Her friends were my choir leaders at church. One day we all went out to supper at Manchu Wok. She could speak almost no English. I knew no Korean. Her friends translated for us during the course of the first meeting. At the end of the supper I asked her out. Two weekends from then we went bowling. We've been married for three years now and the best is yet to come.

at work.

We met in school. I was doing my Master of Library and Information Science, she was doing a PhD in Information Science so we were in the same school at Western. We started working together in the school's computer lab and hit it off as friends. Then she came to school dressed up (skirt, nice sweater, etc.) one day for a open house. Attraction kicked in and my interest started to sway to "more than just friends". At that term's end of term party (this was the January-April term of '89) we spent most of the evening together and over the summer term (it was semestered and I opted to take the summer term so i could finish earlier) we moved fairly quickly into a romantic relationship. 

Mendalla

She was six feet away from me in the church choir and I was the minister.

I met my ex on eharmony.  Two of my cousins married from people they met on plenty of fish and the marriages are still going strong.

 From an earlier thread....

I remember when I first laid eyes on my hsband. 

I had joined the KWRC (Kitchener Waterloo Rally Club) as I had bought a new dodge shelby charger at the time, 2.2 turbo. I was learning how to drive it, so had joined the rally club, and was having a blast with solo I, solo II and this was one of my first rallies.  I had ended an unhealthy relationship and bought the car almost as a treat to myself.  I was not interested in dating and the club was full of nice guys who were older than me.  so good male friends, many were married, some couples belonged.

A friend from the club had asked if I wanted to volunteer at an Ontario car rally,  up near Grundy Prov Park at a place called Britt., and I said sure

The first evening, we were eating dinner in the restaurant, when my friend looked over & said... "you don't want to hang out with those guys".   Lol, it  was like waving a red flag in front of a bull..not sure what he was thinking.....or wait..maybe he did know.
 

One of the guys, was my now husband....we  started dating that week-end. did a bunch of TSD (timespeed distance) rallies, he cracked up my car's plastic spoiler, etc during an ice dice (racing on the frozen Puslinch Lake), put me up on top of a snowbank (and I mean way up), in the Tall Pines  ???? Rally in his old volvo, and, we travelled together as part of a good friends Canada rally team.  We surived as a couple. We were engaged a year later.

(Correction...Tall Pines was a performance, closed-road rally...which was what our friend ran -- serious racing only...can't remember the name of the rally that we ran up in Bancroft..lots of fun, though)

we were teenagers, and I hated him.  Ick. not my type at all.  then he was paying my best friend more interest than he was paying me.... hmmm.  We were in the same martial arts club, neighbouring Scouting groups, had some friends the same, but not school.  We actually had our first real conversation building a parade float, and then kept crossing paths until we started dating a few months later.

I had just turned 18.  Met him in the kitchen of my dorm house in my first week at university.  One of my housemates, Androulla, was sitting on his lap; I knew she was engaged & assumed this was her fiance.  Nope - just her good friend & she introduced us.  He had a huge (and I do mean huge!) afro, and was a pretty cool guy in 3rd year -  he ran the student pub on campus.  He was a friend to most of us in the women's residence house & we just hung out casually for some months before we dated - he had quite number of girfriends!  Our first 'big date' was to the wedding of the woman who introduced us.  She's been divorced twice, but we're still together almost 40 years later!!

cool tale pinga about rallying!

At a Presbytery meeting, my first one after ordination.  I was the new minister to teh Presbytery and Patty was a rep from one of the Thunder Bay Churches.

The night we gathered I was waiting for directions to my billet and PAtty arrived later than the registration time suggested.  She burst through the door to the Devlin hall yelling "Don\t leave! I'm here!'.  Yes that is the first time I saw her, the first words I heard her utter. (EDIT to add: she feels a little sheepish about that fact now )

She then spent the next 2 days getting close to me as often as she could and, apparently, flirting.  I think I clued in by about suppertime the second day.

11 months later we were married, 9 months after that child #1 was born.

And people say Presbytery isn't good for anything!

DKS-so how did that work? Aren't there rules about dating in your congregation?

What fun reading these stories.

 In the Banquet Hall of Victoria Park United Church in Scarborough, Ontario. I had just started attending the church and she was in the choir and on the Board of Stewards, and we met during coffee hour after a service. The rest, as they say, is history.

I met my husband at work.  He was the lowly janitor and I was the plant chemist (there were only 9 employees so it wasn't much of a plant).  We became very close friends and then we became romantic.  The job I have now doesn't involve my degree at all but I'm still paying my student loan so the joke around here is that it is a good thing that he is low maitenance because he was damn expensive.  The only thing I got out of my degree LOL.

My wife and I met at Winn-Dixie (grocery store). She was a cashier and I bagged grocieries. She told me once she got jealous whenever I bagged for another cashier, lol. We even worked there for a while after we were married but eventually moved to Tenn. (we met in N. Carolina) and on to other jobs.

Most of my friends either dropped out of school to get married or got engaged at their graduation party.  Me, I didn't have anyone special, so I took off from NB to seek my fortune in the big city of Montreal.  I returned to NB three years later to attend teachers' college.  The first opportunity I got, I hitchhiked to the village where my little sister and her husband were living, only to learn that she had just been rushed to the nearest hospital in premature labour.   A friend of a friend asked the man would would two years later become Mr. Seeler to drive me out to the hospital where I saw my sister and my little three pound nephew.   

A few weeks later I visited my sister in her home, and played cards with the future Mr. Seeler.  Visits became more frequent as the year went by.  Visit my sister's family - go for a drive with ------.   

Nephew now lives in Alberta with his wife and son - Penny met him with me when I travelled out west in 2007.  And Mr. Seeler and I are parents and grandparents. 

Rules?  Well that is a whole other discussion.  Basically common sense applies and openness is key.  OTOH, some claim it is never appropriate to date in the congregation--I think that position is too concretized and wrong-headed (although I see where it comes from)

I've seen issues happen so I'd say it's an area to tread carefully and be mindful of possible repercussions for all involved. After that event, I'm not sure it's a place I'd want to go if I was a minister or involved with one.

Having said that, let's get back to the nice stories and open a thread in Church Life if we want to discuss this more.

Mendalla

I will Open A Thread in Church Life.

Let's keep this happy.

DKS is happy! I'm just a curious sort and was not implying wrongdoing just wondering.

So come on folks-inspire us single ones out here!

Well, some of you might remember last year I wrote a little teeny story about meeting my partner :) 

But for anyone else, my partner and I met at Kairos UCC young adult conference... then again when I was a student minister and she was a social justice worker in Alberta. 

I like this thread.

Well my sister and brother-in-law met in a LAtin class in University!  And to honour that they did their wedding vows in Latin (officiant said the line in English and then they repeated it in LAtin--with cheat sheets in hand)

Cool. We had the readings (1 Corinthians 13 and a Chinese love poem) at our ceremony in both English and Mandarin to honour my wife's culture but the vows were in English.

Mendalla

University - we're a pair of engineers.  She was blonde, pretty, smart, on a varsity team, and completely out of my league.  If it weren't for her self-confidence issues, I'd have had no shot.

Well, I knew who he was in high school - he was a senior, with a steady girlfriend,  and I was a lowly junior whom he didn't even know existed.

Many years later I was hired at the company he worked at in the department he worked in, both us were involved with other people.  After a few years I transferred into a different department and both of us were unattached.  He came into my office one day and asked me out on a date - I said yes . . . and the rest is history.

And is there a lot of history in this thread.

I'm really enjoying reading these stories.

My partner and I met at Bloor St United Church while planning a worship service and doing music. We were both grad students at U of T. Neither of us had been out (even to ourselves) at that point. The community and openness at Bloor St UC was significant for our self-acceptance. We fell deeply in love - and are still happily, lovingly together 23+ years later.

awwww . . . that's sweet, and a sweet way of expresssing it

This was long before the current ethical climate took over the United Church. I invited her out for coffee and we were married a year later. Both of us had come out of bad relationships.

So you could say that you got married.................Because of Winn-Dixie.

My wife and I met at Drum Corps. She was a member. I was an instructor. She played the trumpet and I taught the percussion section.

When is your anniversary, brother?

I had a long, fascinating story typed yesterday, but my computer crashed and it was lost.  This is the short(er) version:  I was a regular in an online, anxiety support chat room.  I had finally progressed through my anxiety therapy enough to move to a new city and start my first teaching position.  My husband had been a regular in the chat room before I started going there and he had just peeked back in to see how old friends were doing.  Two of our mutual friends started to tell me right away that I had to talk to him...we were both Canadian and we had a lot in common, they said.  Well, Canada is a pretty big place, but fortunately we actually lived less than an hour's drive from each other.  We started chatting and after a couple of weeks I suggested we meet, saying that we had both been burned in online relationships in the past, and since we lived so close we might as well meet face to face right away before we fell in love and then later found out that the other person was crazy.   We got together later in the week for dinner at East Side Marios and through conversation I told him how tough it was to get my classroom all set up the way I wanted it since I didn't have a car, and he offered to drive me around to buy some extra book shelves and proceeded to put them together in my classroom for me.  I didn't know yet that he would be the man I married, but I knew he was a really great guy.

I love reading these stories.

I met Bob while I was dating another.  Peter was sharing a house with Brucce and Bob in Mississauge.  We had gone there one evening to hang out and bob was getting ready for the night shift at Texaco back then.   I was sharing my little apartment with a girfriend who looked after Doug when I was a work.   She was going out with Bruce at the time.  When Peter and I packed it in, Bruce called and said that Bob wanted to go out with me.  Our first date was at the old Riverside in Oakville.  That was May 1977.  We moved in together in September '77. We married in November 1988.  We were together till his passing in October 2007.

I still miss him a lot, but I'm moving on.  Now single and looking!!

We were teaching colleagues. 

Love will find you in the strangest of places . . . when you least expect it . . .

hahahahahaha Love it saul.

I guess only one broken nose per future husband, saul, so she didn't want to a chance with a slug.

John, like me, was a member of the Workers Educational Association. In university vacation times, they held weekly live-in courses in universities in regional country areas.

I was studying philosophy and John was studying art.

We met in the dining room when he happened to sit across from me.

He  later said he was attracted by my beautiful curly hair (it's straight - I had a perm!) and I thought he looked just like my therapist who, at the time, I had a HUGE crush on.

Not exactly a promising beginning.

Later I was sitting in the lounge, reading, when he happened to walk by. He asked me what was I reading and I said something like, "Jean Paul Sartre and the Existentialists".

He said later he thought that any woman who looked like Cher and read books on philosophy had to be interesting.

We started going out and after about six months I realised that he was nothing like my therapist. My lovesick fantasies for my therapist started to recede - to be replaced by the joys of a relationship where my feelings were reciprocated.

With the passing of time we became soul mates -physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually - we were a perfect fit.

He died eighteen months after being diagnosed with leukaemia - and I didn't just know about grief, I lived it - and there are still days when I live it.

Three years have passed since then, and I feel, in some way, he has become a part of me.

I've grown accustomed to solitude, and have no wish to remarry.

That said, maybe one day I'd like a close male friend for companionship...........

Also, I'll never give up flirting, I enjoy it far too much!

outside of a coffee shop.  He wasn't an artist and I fell in love. 

(((((Pilgrim's Progress))))) thank you for sharing your beautiful love story.  I hope you find someone to be a companion.

I hate artists, too.

We had a Bible reading in English, and one in Korean. We had a prayer said in English, and one in Korean. My pastor gave a short message which was translated into Korean by a friend of my wife's. We had a Korean tea ceremony, and a sand ceremony. As guests left the church we handed out free Wagon Wheels, and Choco-pies.

Our anniversary is November 18th.

We met February 18th, 2007. We got engaged July 18th, 2007. We were married November 18th, 2007.

How about you?