After we exchanged numbers, I wasn’t sure if I would ever hear from M. It had taken me so long to even have a conversation with him that I wasn’t convinced that he was interested enough to call… so I made plans to go home for the weekend. My best friend B had a car on campus, and he offered to drive me as he was also heading home and it was sort of on his way. It was not the relaxing respite I was hoping for–I ended up catching a horrible cold and was sick the whole weekend. By the time B arrived to pick me back up on…

So, we finally met. I knew his name, and he could finally put my name in place of the “Lady Bug Girl” which (unbeknownst to me) he had been calling me up to that point. However, things didn’t go quite as smoothly as I hoped. After meeting him late that night, each time I saw him over the next couple of weeks all I could get out of him was a quick smile and a wave. Despite my best efforts to catch his eye, he was so standoffish… and I couldn’t figure out why. He always smiled and seemed happy to see me, but our interactions were so brief. I…

For almost two months in the fall of 2004, I only knew M as “the good-looking-guy-from-the-dance”. After Hallowe’en, I immersed myself in my new life at school. I slowly adjusted to the somewhat overwhelming format of my new classes, though as a girl from small town South Porcupine, sitting in a lecture hall with 500 other students would never feel “normal”. I continued to meet new friends on campus, and slowly established a core group of good friends, many of which I still hold close to my heart to this day. If we weren’t in classes we were hanging out in someone’s apartment or at the Fossil, the local pub…

In truth, M actually noticed me first. In October of 2004 I was 19 years old, and living on my own in Toronto for the first time. I was living in a tiny little residence house on campus with five roommates that I was slowly getting to know. In less than two months I had gone from being terrified of living on my own and attending university to absolutely loving it. It didn’t take long for me to meet some phenomenal people, and in between my heavy class load I found that I had the social life I had always dreamed about. I felt like I was really figuring out…

Many years ago, when I was still a young university student with more free time than I knew what to do with, I decided to write out the story of how M and I met, dated and got married within eight short months. I’m so glad I made a record of it then, because my old brain has since forgotten many of the little details of how our story unfolded. I’ll always keep those entries, but I felt like it was time to go back through and “polish” them a little–my writing style has evolved just a touch since I was twenty two. And so, without any further ado, I…