How Average Jane Met Her Husband

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, I figured this was as good a time as any to tell the story of how I met my husband and how we started dating.

It all started about 14 years ago or so when I was singing in a hard rock band and dating a guitarist I now refer to as my "psycho ex."  We needed a drummer for our band, so he and I ended up going to a drummer’s house for an audition/jam.  While we were there, another drummer showed up.  He had long, curly blond hair like Robert Plant and was wearing an awesome black leather trench coat.  I thought he was mighty fine, but oddly enough the psycho didn’t seem to react with his usual jealousy.  We all stood around outside and chatted for quite a while after we finished playing.

Fast forward seven or eight months:  I’d kicked the psycho to the curb a while back and had recently broken up with a guy with whom I could never have had a future because he was allergic to my cats.  In the meantime, I’d put ads up on music store bulletin boards looking for a new band to join.  I wasn’t having much luck finding a band or a date.

Then one day I got an answering machine message from a guy who had seen my ad and wanted to talk about starting a band.  The message was garbled and I couldn’t make out the phone number.   However, I heard enough to know that it was the hot drummer I’d met before.  Damned Radio Shack answering machine!

Fortunately, he called back when I was home.  We made plans to meet and talk about music.  When he arrived, I discovered that he wasn’t blond anymore, but then again neither was I.  That didn’t make any difference once we got to talking.  The "meeting" rapidly turned into a date.  We went out for Chinese food, had McDonald’s vanilla cones for dessert, and rented "Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey" and watched it on my horrible, old console TV that needed to be pounded on periodically when the screen turned green.

We’ve never been apart since.  He moved in indecently soon after we began dating (not that it was a huge deal – he really didn’t have anything except clothes and drums) and we got married about two years later.  We’ve now been married for more than eleven years.

You may be wondering if we ever got a band together.  Well, not so much.  Actually, we played together briefly in 2004, but that was the first (and so far the last) time.  Clearly, the band thing was just a pretext.

My husband has always told me that he knew I was "the one" from the moment he met me at the other drummer’s house.  I don’t know if I was quite that certain about the whole thing, but I have to admit that when we finally met again, the old cliche of "feeling like you’ve known someone forever" definitely came into play.

So Happy Valentine’s Day, honey!  I look forward to being your Valentine for many more years to come.