Chris and I met my second semester of college. I had dated a few real losers in my first semester and had pretty much sworn off guys. I think my exact words were, “I’m done dating until I find the guy I’m going to marry.” I had no idea that would be three weeks later.

My friend Krista and I were walking down the street toward our dorm when this guy with whom I was not at all impressed started walking with us and chatting. In retrospect, he really was just being friendly, but in my Guys Are Jerks mode I took him to be one of those arrogant Returned Missionaries who comes home after two years of serving the Lord and consider himself to be God’s gift to women. Date me, for I am hot, righteous and a returned missionary. Did I mention the mission? The holiness with which I am now endowed because I. Was. A. Missionary? Seriously, people, you think I’m joking about this, but have you been to Utah? RM status is to many Utah-Mormons the equivalent of a Ph.D and a loaded bankroll. Then there are the more realistic people who acknowledge the good that they have accomplished on the mission and equally acknowledge that they are still basically boys who are clueless, although good. To the arrogant ones, might I remind you how attractive a little humility can be? Do good things, be righteous, don’t be an arrogant prick- that’s all I’m saying.

Anyway, I gave him the cold shoulder, a withering glare, and he kept his conversation directed to the tall blonde and gave the gorgeous but scary brunette a wide berth. Can you blame him? I walked into my dorm and didn’t give him a second thought.

The next Sunday I went to church and guess who happens to be there? Right. So I decide that being at least civil might not hurt.

Over the next few weeks I saw Chris a lot because he was perpetually hanging out at the girls’ dorm. It turns out that he had a plan, and that plan was to take a different girl on a date every single night so he wouldn’t get attached to just one. Sometimes he would even line up back to back dates! To his credit, he wasn’t fooling around with them. It was all one long line of first date pleasantries and then on to the next chick on the list. You can image how many girls this upset. You see, the college we were at had about 8 girls to every boy, and at least 60% of them were there trying to get their Mrs. People didn’t date flippantly; every date was an interview for marriage for many of these gals. For me, my dating was more of an intense desire to eat out and not pay for it. Sure I’d go out with Mr. Doesn’t Stand A Chance if it involved free Mexican food. He wasn’t going to get anything but conversation from me, so it wasn’t like I was being a slut about it.

About two weeks after we met I heard through the grapevine that Chris had said that I seemed very prim and proper. This completely intrigued me. When I was in high school my friends used to joke and call me “the prude”. It was all in a good fun. When I arrived at a small town Utah college, people began to refer to me as “wild”. I had not changed a bit. I liked to have fun, I liked to stay out late, but I was still basically a prude. No drinking, no drugs, no sex. The wildest thing I did was drive to Denny’s at 3am with a bunch of friends and admit to being a Democrat. To have someone who hardly knew me look at me and see my awkwardness, my insecurity and judge me honestly shook me up a bit. I decided that I was going to show this boy exactly how not prim and proper I was, so I decided to actually talk to him and be nice. ( I know, I’m tough, eh?)

So we began to talk. It turned out that he was pretty easy to talk to. We were both from out of state, so our perspectives we very similar on many levels. At the same time, since he was from the San Francisco Bay Area and I was from Fargo, North Dakota, we were intensely different. I was intrigued.

Now, at the time I was taking a maximum course load of 20 credits, and many of them were advanced courses. I was also rehearsing for the college musical. Basically, I was so busy that we were only seeing each other on weekends or after he had brought that night’s date back to the dorm. Many of our conversations started because he was teaching Sunday school. I would sit in his class and for an hour we would have a one on one gospel centered discussion while the other thirty people in the class watched on, amused. People began to talk, and some of my roommates even started talking marriage. I laughed at it all because I was so done with guys. This was fun. This was casual. Nothing to see here.

More of how we became us to come. . .