Head Tale

Most couples meet through friends or dating sites or at church or the bar.  The story of how Shea and I met is a bit more random.

Her parents were at a funeral and happened to be talking to someone from my hometown.  They mentioned their daughter was starting university in the fall and needed a place to stay.

The person said they knew of two families from my hometown that owned condos and rented rooms.  One was owned by a couple who were farmers and teachers (and coincidentally, their son was a good friend of mine and I had actually lived in their condo first before my parents decided to follow their lead and buy a condo that my sister and I could live in while we were in University, renting out the extra rooms to help pay the mortgage.)

The other condo they knew about was owned by a farmer and a nurse.  That was my parents and since Shea was going to be studying to be a nurse, they decided to call us first.

I’m not sure if it was the first day they came to see the condo or move her in but they still joke about me sitting on the couch, and in a very “college” moment, eating macaroni and tomatoes right from the pot, possibly even offering her parents some! 🙂

Shea moved in in 1997 which means I’ve known her for 19 years, nearly half of my life, but we obviously didn’t start dating right away and our relationship was strictly platonic.

There’s a bit of a soap opera part in here that led to us dating that I’m not going to get into but at any rate, we started dating a year or so after she moved into the condo (I make the totally inappropriate joke that we started dating after she couldn’t pay the rent one month but the reality is that I’m always happy that we started our relationship as friends – going to movies, playing cards, eating meals together – and it grew from there.)

Our dating was sort of on the down low at first (kids today have a different term for it – “Friends with Benefits”!) with her parents still asking “When did you start dating?” occasionally and my mom corralling me at lunch one day to ask if I was dating my roommate which I denied even though it was basically true.

Our relationship continued to solidify and grow though we moved at a pretty slow pace (hmm, maybe that’s what inspired the name of our son?).

Shea convocated from nursing in 2001 and wanted to move to Alberta for a bit to have the experience of living in a different province/bigger city.  We had some serious discussions about our relationship at that point since I was very happy in Saskatchewan.  But luckily for Pace and Sasha, we ended up moving to Calgary together and ended up staying there for three and a half years.

While living in Calgary, we got engaged at Fairmont Hot Springs in 2002 and married in Mexico in 2003.  We moved back to Saskatchewan eventually and had Pace in 2007 then Sasha came along in 2013.

We’re recently passed fifteen years of marriage and for the most part, it’s been pretty good.  What works well is that we’re of a similar mind on the big picture stuff – politics, religion, finances, etc. (not to mention we both work in caring professions which shows a similarity in personalities as well).  But we also complement each other well.  Shea’s the detail-oriented, logical planner and I’m the big picture dreamer; she tends to keep things serious and on track, I tend to be goofy and prone to spontaneity.  To co-opt the popular metaphor, she’s the destination and I’m the journey.

After getting married on the beach in Mexico in March 2003, we had a reception in Shea’s small hometown for a couple hundred friends and family who couldn’t join us in Mexico.

Neither Shea nor I are huge dancers and were sort of dreading the obligatory “first dance”.  While reading about weddings online, I’d come across the idea of a “removal dance” instead of a “first dance”.

The idea is that you invite all married couples to join you on the dance floor.  The DJ plays a song (I had a perfect one in mind where each verse details the growing depth of a couple’s relationship through old age with a beautiful melody and a darkly realistic lyric) and after each verse, your MC asks people who’ve been married “less than one year”, “less than five years”, less than ten years” and so on to leave the dance floor.

(And holy shit, until reading about this song on Song Meanings, I’d *never* realised that the conceit of starting each verse with “Line One is the time…”, “Line Two is the time…” had a double meaning as he’s not just describing the start of a verse in the song which is how I’d always heard it but also how each verse captures something that causes wrinkles (lines) to appear over time!  So much for my English degree helping me learn to analyse texts!)

We hadn’t planned it out ahead of time but Shea and I left at the first announcement (along with a couple septuagenarians who’d remarried late in life but had only been married to each other less than a year!) then stood on the edge of the dance floor watching other couples dancing – friends who’d married a few years before us and whose weddings we’d attended, cousins and gradually older aunts and uncles, our respective parents, and others in the crowd.

Again, we hadn’t planned it this way but it worked out perfectly when the final verse was introduced by our MC saying “Could everyone married forty years or less leave the dance floor” and it emptied except one long-time couple from Shea’s side and one long-time couple from my side.  (Quick note – I like how many weddings now post signs saying “Take any chair – we’re not about sides” which is a positive change from the old way of thinking of each family having a “side” of the hall or church or whatever.)  We went back on the dance floor and joined the two longest lasting couples at our reception to finish the dance together in a big circle.

Life will bring many joys, much sadness and the odd curveball but here’s hoping that even if we’re not big dancers, Shea and I are the last ones dancing at some young couple’s wedding someday a few decades in the future!