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September 1, 2015

My Last First Date

Every time I tell the story, I say that I wasn’t nervous.  No part of me was shaking, my palms weren’t sweating, and other than having to turn around a few times to find the Starbucks we were meeting at, it felt like I was headed to meet someone for coffee who WASN’T going to be a potential boyfriend.

We’d been matched on eHarmony sometime during the month of August and after exchanging questions and our “must haves/can’t stands” lists, we emailed a few times within the website.  After my last email to Ben, I didn’t hear back from him for almost a week and even though I went back to try and figure out if it was because of something I said, I had to tell myself that if it wasn’t meant to be, then it was ok that I didn’t hear back from him.

But within a day or so, he wrote me back saying, “Obviously I’m really bad at this so why don’t we meet for coffee?”  So we scheduled our first date for a Wednesday evening around 8:30pm.  I’m pretty sure I pulled into the parking lot right at 8:30 since I had turned around several times trying to find this Starbucks… in my defense though, it was one I’d never noticed before because it was tucked into a strip of several stores instead of being a stand-alone store.  But, I made it!

Technically this wasn’t a blind date since we’d been communicating on eHarmony and had photos of each other, but I was afraid I wouldn’t recognize him when I saw him.  Because let’s face it… if you haven’t met someone in person before, do they ever really look like their photos?  But when I walked to the front door, I saw this guy sitting at one of the outside tables looking as calm and collected and confident as anyone could.

I can’t remember how that first introduction went… I don’t know if he saw me and stood up or if I said something first, but I remember standing there saying hi and Ben inviting me inside to get something to drink.  As we stood in line waiting to order and making small talk, I remember trying to get a good look at him (without him noticing. Which is hard to do when you’re standing right next to someone!).  When he tells the story, he says that we hadn’t been there for 5 minutes and he already knew I didn’t like him!  That was the farthest thing from the truth, but clearly I need to work on my first impressions with people ;-)

Well, the night only got better from there; he bought my chai tea (I don’t think I’d discovered the latte version yet) and we went outside to the table he’d been sitting at when I arrived.  I remember I put a little too much milk in my tea because I ended up spilling it on the table as we talked.  But at least I didn’t spill it on me!  That would have been even more embarrassing… and painful.

We talked until they started sweeping up outside to close the store, so he walked me to my car where we talked for another 15 minutes.  I had no idea how to end this date because we’d just spent the previous 2 hours talking and clearly could have stayed for a while longer!  Finally, he asked me for my number so that he could call me and as he says, I got a huge smile on my face as I gave it to him :-)  I also remember us exchanging our last names because all we had from eHarmony was our first names.  And I’m pretty sure when I got in my car, I said his full name out loud just to hear what it sounded like.  And no, I did NOT say my first name with his last name that night!

After pulling back out onto Woodruff Rd from the parking lot, I called my friend Arica to let her know how things went… and that he definitely wasn’t a crazy person who had kidnapped me.  These days, you can’t be too careful!  For a first date though, it was wonderful.  I’d had decent first dates before, but looking back on it, I left with a smile on my face and was looking forward to him calling me soon… more so than I had with any other first date before.

It’s just hard to believe that all of that happened 5 years ago.  And it’s hard to believe how amazing, hard, wonderful, fun, challenging, adventurous, and exciting the last 5 years have been with this man.  I never imagined I would have still been single in my 30s, but I’ve said it before and I will say it a million more times during my life… it was 1000% worth waiting on the RIGHT man that God had for me.  I’ll talk more about this in another post soon, but with the things we’ve walked through in our short 5 years together (the good, bad and ugly), I can’t imagine having gone through it with someone who wasn’t in God’s plan for my life.

Each year on September 1, we try to go to “our Starbucks” together.  And this year looked drastically different since we’ve added another person into the mix!  She didn’t last very long since it was close to her dinner time, but I’m pretty sure we laughed (at her) more than any other year we’ve done this!

5Years-Starbucks

Thank you for continuing to ask me out for coffee, Ben.  Even if I don’t actually drink coffee ;-)  I love you so much and I’m excited to see what the next 5 years have in store for us!

  1. Ashley Post says:

    How fun to take your baby girl with you this year! God is so good :)

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