Weddingbee Blog

I’ve toyed with talking about how I met Mr. Penguin for some time, but always feel somewhat embarrassed retelling the story. A “normal” love story often consists of 2 people mutually falling in love because they are clearly attracted to each other and want to give each other a spin. I don’t know if it’s my lack of self confidence, or over confidence in setting my mind to something and making it happen, or something in between (clearly it is something in between, because who considers him/herself both lacking confidence and being over confident?), but I would consider our love story to have begun with more of a “poaching of prey” than “two people falling madly in love”.

I don’t have a lot of patience for crap, and dating was one thing I considered TOTAL crap. So, around the ripe age of 19, I decided to poach me a husband.

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I knew I wanted to marry my husband from the minute I met him. But not for all those fuzzy lovey normal reasons people claim love at first sight for—I feel like I evaluated my husband’s traits and tendencies for exactly what they are, figured that they were compatible with the life I wanted to live, and decided that, at whatever cost, we WOULD get together and I WOULD make him eventually marry me—love be damned.

Just kidding, I totally wanted to manipulate him into loving me first. I mean… whatever’s necessary to fit into society’s standards for marriage was fine. Sure, as society dictates, he needed to ask me, and all (lame.). But I could make it happen. I was resourceful. And by resourceful, I mean evil and crafty.

I’ve had a concrete idea of my ideal mate from a fairly young age (whenever you start considering liking boys, or girls, or whatever you like) and I knew I wanted to search hard for “jackpot man” and then sink my claws into him. The thought of dating multiple men pained me, mostly because the idea of “casually dating” sounded like such a HUGE waste of time to me. I still cringe when I see people out on first or early dates. I mean, that stuff hurts me. I stare at my husband at dinner, laughing and talking about our dog or whatever mundane life events we’re experiencing and relish in thinking, “THANK GOD I only had to do that awkward first date thing 3 or 4 times in my lifetime.” (Mark and I first started dating when I was 19.) The idea of dating was never thrilling to me. Eating popcorn on the couch and picking my nose is more my game.

So, I had a mental list of traits. I wont list them all here, but they were very specific, and all pretty generic. I think Natalie from the movie Up in the Air said it best:

source

I found my Matt or John or… Dave at a party when I was a freshman. I asked around about him—he hit all my list of traits to a T. The guy was LITERALLY my ideal mate. I wanted to make him like me, and I had just enough confidence in my personality that I could make it happen.

It took a pretty long few months of putting myself in as many of his social situations as possible. I’m not one to be outwardly forward about things that I want (but I work really hard behind the scenes to make things happen in my favor) but after a while his defenses were worn down and he figured it would be easier to date me than to face my wrath and get rid of me. After all, I just so happened to be EVERYWHERE he wanted to be. Night after night I’d “just so happen” to find myself in the same social situations as he was.

And so, he dated me.

I know in my heart of hearts that my husband never sat around and thought that his ideal mate was a short chubby Asian chick from Sacramento. I look at him now, 9 years later, and sometimes think, ’Really? From the looks of him, I thought he was my ideal mate?’ It’s hard to remember back to that day that I met him. But he was. And he is. Good instincts, 19-year-old-me. He’s perfect.

From then on, my husband and I have had a semi-typical college sweethearts kind of love story. We drank a lot, and then somewhere in that all we made out a lot, then got together, broke up, got together again, all the while still maintaining our rigorous drinking schedules. Whew. College was hard. 7 years later, we married.

East to West, college girls are easy

Sometimes I tell people this story and feel embarrassed—embarrassed that I was the pursuer and not the pursuee. But I knew that the man I ended up with had to be someone that I liked first; someone I actively convinced to love me and marry me.

Were you the pursuer or the pursuee in your relationship?