Today is the ninth anniversary of when I met my husband Josh for the first time and we had our first date. I’m feeling cheesy so I’m going to talk about it!
For those of you who don’t know, I met Josh on OkCupid on May 9, 2011. I messaged him because his picture was him and an adorable dog (who is now known as our dog) and his profile talked about his love of Anchorman, which is one of my favorite movies.
We chatted for a bit and made plans to meet in person at my dinner break the next night at work. We worked at the same newspaper in different departments on different floors and we’d never seen each other, at least that we could remember.
Josh stopped by my desk at 7:30 p.m., and I remember being so insanely terrified and nervous because I thought I could end up really liking him (spoiler alert: I did). I honestly don’t remember much about that night because I was so nervous. I swear he remembers more about it than I do, and usually his memory isn’t so great.
We walked over to Subway together. I got a buffalo chicken sandwich (RIP, they need to bring this back!) and he got the sweet onion chicken teriyaki. I remember he talked about his dog Bella, who he said he didn’t name and it had nothing to do with Twilight. I don’t remember much else that we talked about, honestly.
I remember he walked me back to work and then we exchanged numbers. We went on a number of dates over the next two weeks, including a date to go see the newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I remember sitting side by side and wanting to hold his hand but being too nervous to do it (this was before the nice big reclining seats).
When we stood outside the theater afterwards, it felt like we might kiss or something, but nothing ended up happening and we both left. After I drove away for a bit, I decided to drive back to the movie theater parking lot to see if he was still there, but he wasn’t. Later, Josh told me he had pulled over into a parking lot on his way home to sit and think about me, too.
On May 24, two weeks after our first date, we became an official couple when Josh asked me to go steady with him as we sat on the patio furniture outside my parents’ house where I lived at the time and held hands.
I honestly cannot believe that we’ve been together for nine years already. In some ways it feels like just a few, and in other ways it feels like it’s been a lifetime, but in a good way, mostly 😉
I’m very, very grateful to have Josh in my life. We’ve been through a lot of ups and downs in our nine years together, even in the last year or so, honestly, and I’m proud to say that we’re stronger than ever.
It’s so humbling and interesting and strange and wonderful to look back on where we were in our lives nine years ago versus today.
This morning, I had some coffee and Eggo waffles with syrup while he ate two chocolate chip cookies for breakfast. We wished his mom a happy Mother’s Day (because we all still live together in Josh’s late aunt’s house), and then he left to go to Fleet Farm to get some materials to work on our garden.
Now I’m sitting at my computer, watching True Blood and typing out this post. There’s a lot that I never would’ve predicted would’ve been in our future, and I’m sure that’ll keep being true in the future, but I’m really, really grateful for where we are now together.
It’s taken a lot of work to get here, both of us fighting on making our relationship work over the years. It has definitely not all been easy, but I’m grateful for that. We’ve been through much more together than I ever would’ve imagined, but we’re still here and in love, even if we do drive each other crazy sometimes.
To round out this post, I thought it’d be fun to include photos of ourselves over the years. They were all downloaded from Facebook, so please excuse the quality of a few of them. Anyway, here we go, in mostly chronological order!
