Real Life Romance: Part Five

Need a refresher? Click here for parts 1-4 of the Real Life Romance series.

Lucy Got Lucky

I am very sorry, but this installment of the RLR series is very lengthy. I tried to condense it, but there is just so much to tell and our story just would not be complete without the details. If you need to take a break and rest your eyes part way through, I completely understand. But please bear with me and stick it out until the end. Trust me, it's worth it. I tried to break it up with some of my favourite photos of us while we were dating. They have no real relevance to the story - just a visual to break up the writing :)

If you are catching up you will remember that the fabulous dude had just arrived home from summer camp after leaving me hanging for a grueling 6 weeks. As soon as he returned to his parents house, however, the very first thing he did was call me and ask if he could come visit. Of course, I was ecstatic and said yes. It was a three hour drive and I had an afternoon/early evening shift at the restaurant so I knew he'd be at my house when I got finished. In the last post I said it was a Saturday but now that I think about it, I think it was a Friday and he was planning to stay until Monday or something. I asked my parents if it was okay if he came over for the weekend and everything was all set. I was a nervous wreck during my shift at work!

I got home and he was there waiting for me. It was somewhat awkward because neither of us were really sure what we were supposed to do or say. We headed down to my parents boat where we would stay for the weekend. We spent the day on Saturday enjoying the sun and the beach. We stayed up late catching up and talking. Somewhere in the midst of our convo, we talked about the bed-wetting problem he had until he was about 8 years old.

Apparently this conversation struck something in his subconscious because he woke up at about 3 am and realized he was wetting his bed (don't worry - I have his permission to share this story). Remember - we were on my parents boat. Boats don't have a lot of room. My parents were asleep in their bed, he was in the other bed and I was on the floor between them. If I stretched, I could literally touch the base of my parents bed with my fingers and the base of his bed with my toes. Apparently he woke up, rushed out of the boat and tried to think about what to do. Finally, around 5 am, he woke me up and asked me to come outside. He took me for a walk and said he had a surprise for me and that he bet me $100 I would laugh at his surprise. I took the bet and he proceeded to tell me that he had peed the bed on my parents boat. Needless to say, he won the bet. When my parents woke up and were on the dock making breakfast, I quickly stripped the sheets off the bed. Luckily, he was sleeping on top of a sleeping bag and so the pee didn't soak through onto the sheets or, worse, the mattress. I loaded all the bedding (including the stuff from my parents bed so as not to look suspicious) into my car and told my mom I'd wash it all and bring it back because they were having more company the next weekend.

So, you may be wondering why in the world, other than to embarrass my husband, would I tell this story? Well, because, as I'm sure you'd agree, if a girl agrees to sneak around her parents and clean up a guy's pee sheets on their "first date", and the guy isn't too ashamed to show his face around the girl again, there is no doubt that they are meant to be together. After that incident, he basically had no choice but to marry me. (As a funny aside, over the next couple years, most of our friends and his family found out about this story. But, miraculously, we managed to keep the incident a secret from my parents and my entire family, until he confessed it to my father at our wedding reception - the way he told him is quite funny - perhaps I shall share this story another time...)

After the weekend of holding hands and laughing together and cleaning up pee sheets (but NO kissing - not for his lack of trying), he headed back to his parents house. He stayed there for about a week, bought his first truck, and then moved back to the town where we went to high school to return full time to the farming job he had during high school. It seems as though we never really looked back. There was never a time when we "officially" started dating, it just seemed as though we both had the understanding that now was our time. We sometimes questioned why we didn't start dating during high school but both of us agreed that there was a reason and that God timed it perfectly for us to begin our relationship.

Somewhere around the beginning of our relationship, he nicknamed me Lucy. There was also a song on the radio at the time that said "Lucy got Lucky and Lucky got Lucky, too". So, we became Lucy and Lucky. To this day, I am Lucy to him and some of his family members.

In September I moved into my sister's apartment and began university (I was about 1.5 hours away from him now). Thankfully, the farm he worked at shipped out of a town about 15 minutes away so he usually was able to visit about once a week (I've got some really cool stories about these visits too - another day). We got really serious really fast and he started talking about marriage. Believe it or not, he wanted to get married at Christmas only 4 short months after we began dating!! I quickly put an end to that idea. Yet, I knew that marriage was in our (near) future and living 1.5 hours apart wasn't going to cut it. After my first semester, we decided that we were serious enough to make some drastic changes. We started weighing our options. He could quit his job, move to my city and find a new job. I wasn't enjoying my time at university and I hated living in the city (small town girl) so, instead, I applied to transfer to a university closer to him for my second year. By May, the plans were all set for me to move in with his cousin, who lived in the same town as him, the following September.

At this point, we started seriously saving some money so that we would be able to afford to get married. His father was skeptical of us talking about marriage when we were so young because of financial constraints, so we wanted to show him that we could do it. And we certainly did show him, I might add. I was almost certain that the proposal would come at some point over the summer, before I moved back to GL town.

The summer came and went, and I did not have a ring. We had started looking at rings and had picked out a few that we really liked. I was starting to get impatient although now I have no idea why I was in such a hurry. I became almost obsessed with talking about getting engaged. If you know me at all, you know that I am a planner, an organizer and perhaps a control freak. The idea of not knowing what was going on and having no control over it drove me bonkers. The FD started to get really fed up with my constant bugging.

Just before Thanksgiving, he took me for a walk and told me that he thought we were moving too quickly. I was so angry with him. Wasn't he the one who had wanted to get married right when we started dating? Wasn't he the one who suggested we move closer to each other? He apologized and told me that he just wasn't ready to think about marriage. He said he wasn't doubting that he wanted to marry me. He was simply doubting when he wanted to do so. He said all the pressure was making him uncomfortable. I was sure he was having second thoughts about our relationship. I was scared, confused and insecure. However, he stilled invited me to come home with him for Thanksgiving. I agreed and so as we headed up north to his parents house to celebrate Thanksgiving, I had no idea what was going to happen to us.

To be continued...

The Real Life Romance series is being linked up at MM&Ms at Musings of a Future Pastor's Wife