The History of C and G

Since it is our three-year anniversary next week, it is worth (re)telling the story of how we met. It's pretty awesome. Way back in 2006, I was still living in Tucson. I had been dating since moving to Tucson (I was coming to the end of my 3rd year living there) but nothing serious. I dated one fellow for six months or so and that was the longest thing. I'd actually reached the point where I decided not to date anymore because I was just going to go "on the market" (i.e. start looking for a tenure-track job) in 2 years and it didn't seem like there would be enough time to build a relationship with anyone and have them be willing to move with/for me by the time I anticipated being done with my PhD.

Then one night near the end of the semester I was procrastinating grading papers or some such thing and found myself browsing MySpace for single fellows. I sent clever, one-line e-mails to two of them. The next day, I found myself with an e-mail back from the first guy (not C). To my surprise, he'd sent me a long pornographic story that he'd cut-and-pasted from an erotic website.

Um.

Okay, so not only is there the somewhat obvious fact that no girl likes to get unsolicited porn, but also, you're e-mailing a PhD student in English, for goodness' sake. Does it have to be plagiarized on top of everything else? Enter C: his first e-mail basically said, "I read your profile, and we have the same favorite book!"

Ding ding ding! We have a winner:-)

We exchanged a couple of e-mails and then he tried to add me as a friend, but I had my MySpace set up so that you either had to know my last name or my e-mail address to send me a friend request, and he had neither. He e-mailed me and said, "do you want to be my friend?" I essentially said that depended, because I went out for beer with my friends. Lo and behold! A first date.

We met at Gentle Ben's (walking distance from my house) and everything went great. I actually called Dalyn halfway through the date when he was buying me another drink and said, "I think this one's a keeper!" After a couple of hours talking he brought me to an end-of-semester party his friends were having. Two days later we went out again, and he revealed that he was moving to Phoenix for a summer job (about 120 miles away). We decided our chemistry was too great to have things end there, and managed to squeeze in one more date before he moved. We decided to be exclusive before he even left, and visited back and forth all summer until he moved back to Tucson.

We dated like normal people for a year while he finished law school, and then he got a job in Phoenix and I still had a year left of my PhD. So he moved and I arranged my schedule (since he was working full time like a regular person) so that I could spend four days a week in Phoenix with him and three days a week in Tucson. I put almost 10,000 miles on my car driving back and forth on a weekly basis for 8 months. During this time I did do a national job search for faculty positions, but didn't come up with anything that would enable C to make a lateral move and retain his current salary.

So after I defended my dissertation (April 9, 2008!) I put in notice at my Tucson apartment and moved to Phoenix - sans job, sans friends, sans everything (or so Jaques says in Shakespeare's As You Like It). I applied to job after job and was finally offered a position at the only place that called me back - the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. I coordinate the grduate programs and make a decent salary, fantastic insurance, retirement plan, vacation days...I have it all!

So here we are in Phoenix until the wind blows us somewhere else (hopefully within 2-3 years). Happy, both working to pay off our consumer debt and, one of these days, save for a wedding.

And all because some other guy made him look good by sending me porn.