Jodifur asks me how I met my husband.  Well, we fought. 

We first met briefly about two years before my first marriage deteriorated.  It was at a science fiction convention (ShadowCon, for those of my friends who know the Con circuit).  This is a fairly odd thing, because I really don’t “do” SciFi cons.  While this may be going against form for the average SCA member, the whole fantasy thing is just not my bag – I am in it for the history and the fighting.  I only went to ShadowCon because friends of mine hosted the Con every year, and I usually helped them work it by running the auction or the game room.  Kris was working security for the Con – as an almost 7-foot tall, 300 lb. former bar bouncer, he was pretty much typecast on that count.  We got introduced, we exchanged pleasantries.  He was cute (if you can call a man that looks astonishingly like a professional on the WCW circuit “cute”), but I was married, and it was a purely academic assessment.

Fast forward two years later.

My marriage, through a combination of my single-minded workaholism during graduate school and issues that had gone unresolved for years, had all but dissolved and papers were being filed.  Newly single after over nine years, I took a week’s vacation from graduate school to attend a large SCA “war” (Lilies War for my SCA readers).  I hadn’t had the chance to really put on my armor in a while and I was looking forward to fighting all day and partying all night with nobody waiting up for me.   I was feeling old and was pondering the future as a single, geeky, and undateable woman, when this glimpse from the past showed up in our camp with a mutual friend.  We ended up fighting in a group together in some of the larger battles.  He looked hot in his armor.  I gave him my favor for a sponsored tournament.  He escorted me to a bellydancing party.  We had a really good time (wink, wink).

And here’s another of those irony of life moments.  The absolutely last thing I was looking for was a relationship.  I am not one of those needy single girls.  I actually enjoy living alone.  I am big on the concept of personal space and quiet isolation.  I distinctly and pointedly told the man that was to become my future husband “look, don’t read anything into this.  This is emphatically not a relationship.  This is about fun.  Period.”   Okay, I didn’t say “fun”, but this is a G-rated blog. So, we went our merry ways.  Me, back to Columbia, MO and the graduate school cycle of lab-sleep-lab-sleep, and him back to Jackson, MS and life as an IT tech-in-training.  

Two months pass by, and one afternoon when I was uncharacteristically idle in the lab, my thoughts wandered back to that balmy June evening and the tall handsome stranger with the shaved head.  He was SO not my type.  At all.  But, well, my type obviously wasn’t working for me, was it?  Almost on a whim, I called a mutual friend and asked for Kris’s phone number.   And there were many giggles, because completely unknown to me, Kris had called just FIVE MINUTES before to ask him for my number. 

On our second “date” we met in Memphis for the conventional movie-dinner-drinks thing, and he told me he was going to marry me.  I laughed at him.

He laughed last and hardest.  The man that looked hot in armor, but was definitely NOT my type turned out to be my soulmate.

I think, after nine years, he is still laughing at me.