How I Met My Wife

I’ve been dating my wife for almost 12 years, and we’ve been married 8.5 years now. The way we met was amusing. We first met each other at a Halloween party. She had moved to Minneapolis the very year I left. I was working at a tiny town in western Iowa, and everyone my age was either married with kids or hung around in bars. I didn’t have much in common with the married families, and I don’t enjoy hanging around in bars; I can’t block out noise of other people’s conversations. My students will tell you, I hear a lot more than they think that I can. In bars, I hear so much that everything is a dull roar, including the person who is right in front of me.

Anyhoo, since I didn’t find any of my own kind (i.e. gaming nerds) in Remsen, my social life was still up in the Twin Cities. Once a month, I’d head back up there. Over Halloween, I went to a party of a friend of mine. This friend is a lesbian, and she has some very attractive lesbian friends, so when I saw Kath dressed as a Greek goddess, I though, “nice looking redhead. Gotta be a lesbian.”

Yup, when I first met my wife, I thought she was a lesbian.

We really got to know each other thanks to my high school friend Nick. He started to run a Vampire the Masquerade game, and both Kath and I were playing. In the first gaming session, Nick’s sister Laura and I were playing out a roleplaying piece where her Chinese princess vampire and my Eskimo vampire were trying to communicate in broken English. At one point, Ang Mei (Laura’s character) attacked my Wendell Gogh. Wendell grabbed her wrists and growled. Kath at that point broke in with saying “What hell wrong?” I took her statement and ran with it, creating one of the most memorable roleplaying interactions that my gaming groups have ever had.



Kath and I clicked from there on out. And almost 12 years later (our first real date was April Fool’s Day going to see “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain”) I am still madly in love with her.