I met my wife in a men’s room
Reading this as a headline with fresh eyes, I realize this could be interpreted in multiple ways — some of them salacious. My apologies — this may be more mundane than you expect, but it’s an honest statement and still a funny story that always gets a few laughs.
My wife is a cis-woman, I didn’t meet her as a man before transition. She was not looking for nor did we have sex in that bathroom. It was not at some bar where she was drunk and wandered into the wrong bathroom. She was not in desperate straights and trying to avoid a long line to get in the ladies’ restroom.
It was booze though. We were warming up for a black-tie choral performance and one of the guys had brought some peppermint schnapps to pass around so we could loosen up a little bit before going on stage, and it was stashed in the men’s room. My wife got wind of it and wanted a swig so she just burst on in, and there I was with the bottle to my lips.
To my credit, I did not choke or spew in surprise. I thought — I like this girl’s attitude: see something you want and go for it. Taking that a cue, I went for her — but she wouldn’t come out after the performance because she had to work the next day. Lame, right? I showed her. I went out with someone else and didn’t ask her out again for a month.
I’m not that big on planning ahead, and I called her up on one afternoon to ask her out on a date that evening. She already had plans to go out with a girlfriend and turned me down (OK, technically a rain check). So after another month of going out with other women, I asked her out again. It was a Wednesday afternoon, or maybe I called in the morning this time, and asked her to go out that evening. Like I said, I had a problem with planning ahead at that point in my life.
Apparently, she really wanted to go out with me, because this time she agreed and skipped out on a choir rehearsal (different choir).
It was an awful first date. Don’t judge me, please — it all worked out in the end (keep on reading). On the recommendation of a friend who was in his defense not recommending it as a first date, I took her to see “Koyaanisqatsi”. If you’ve seen this, you know what I mean, and if you haven’t there’s probably a good reason for that.
Wikipedia describes it as an “American experimental film” consisting “primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and many natural landscapes”. Yeah, like a camera mounted on the bumper of a sports car driving at breakneck speed on a windy road and then cutting to the view from a small plane as if the car launched from the road and took flight. The name of the film comes from the Hopi word for “Life in Turmoil” — and the soundtrack was exclusively Hopi chanting around that theme. Great date flick — NOT!
The opening scene was the slow-motion explosion of a some kind of refinery or chemical plant. It’s the kind of shot that might be the opening of a spy movie or action film. It being pre-internet days and me being overly trusting of the friend, I’d not done any research on the movie and it was only after watching five minutes of what I originally thought was an opening sequence that I realized this WAS the movie.
The sensible thing to do at that moment would have been to turn to her and ask if she really wanted to watch the movie, but that would have made sense and my frontal lobe wasn’t fully baked and I had decided to be intellectually curious about the movie rather than sensitive to the interests of my date.
Did I mention the swooping, swerving plane in flight sequences? She gets motion sick, and we were just close enough to the front of the theater that she spent a large part of the movie with her eyes closed do avoid hurling into her drink cup or the floor. By the time it was over, she was sooo00 ready.
Oblivious to what must have been obvious discomfort on her part following this less than stellar start to the evening, I asked her if she wanted to go get something to drink. I have a bad habit of saying something a little too general, like “drink”, when I have a much more specific idea in my brain. She’s thinking “oh, yeah — I could really use a cocktail right now and thank you for asking”. I”m thinking “A cup of coffee sounds really good”.
So I took her to a diner where they didn’t even serve alcohol, because I wanted a snack too. I had no clue she was disappointed. She was making the best of it and we actually had a wide-ranging conversation for the next couple of hours. Things were starting to look up. Actually, they’d never really looked anything but up for me because I had not learned to pick up on a wide range of social cues.
I don’t know if it was the movie, moral principles, or what, but she wouldn’t go home with me after the movie, so I drove her home. At this particular time, she was staying with her parents, so I had to drop her off at their house. After stopping my car in their driveway, we had one of those heart-stopping yes-I-can’t-wait-to-really-get-my-hands-all-over-you kisses.
Thank gawd it was somewhere in that range of intensity for her as well, because the next thing that happened is when she got out of the car, I didn’t. I know, right? What a schmuck! I sat there and was at least polite enough to see her hand on the door before backing out of the driveway, although as she never fails to remind me — she didn’t even have the door open yet.
Fortunately, before she got out of the car she had already agreed to go out with me again on Saturday. She didn’t ditch me, I asked her to marry me six weeks later, and we’ve been married now for almost thirty-two years. It’s been anything but boring, but more about that in other stories. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about our first meeting, and if you did, please click on the little heart to recommend it so others are more likely to have the chance to enjoy it as well.
