Here's my addition to Kathleen's post from last week about how we first met, since not everyone knows the story (see her version here).I was actually in a relationship and living with that person the first time I met Kathleen as an editorial assistant at The Denver Post, which was roughly in the late spring/early summer of 2004. I wasn't perfectly happy in that relationship, but being the nice guy that I am, I didn't even consciously consider Kathleen as someone I could date, since we worked together and I was already taken. (That would probably explain why I was such a jerk to her the first time I met her -- when another editorial assistant took her over to my desk to introduce her to me and I barely looked up.)
In typical fourth-grade schoolboy fashion, I was chilly towards her not because I didn't like her, but because I very much DID. I'd seen her around the newsroom before that and thought she was intensely cute, but the better I got to know her, the more close our friendship became. We had so much in common -- our tastes in music and film, our writing sensibilities, our (occasionally sick) senses of humor, our love of travel and food. And the more we hung out (mostly on work breaks, but occasionally for lunch or drinks) the more impossible it became not to want to be around her all the time.
When my relationship with my girlfriend at the time ended in January of 2005, I was a little distressed to find that Kathleen was already taken again. But when THAT relationship ended, it wasn't long before we were finding excuses to hang out, see concerts, talk shop and generally make eyes at each other. And then on March 21, 2005, after a night of discussing her visit to the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, we had our first kiss.
In hindsight, I'm extremely grateful we had that time to get to know each other as friends (even if we had secret crushes on each other), because despite the usual ups and downs over the years we've always gone back to that friendship as a way of relating to each other. I believe it's why we're still together (and getting married) more than half a decade later.
