Just in time for Valentine's Day, I'm taking Shannon up on her challenge to tell the story of how I met Lansing & got engaged. Let me preface this by saying we never actually got engaged, officially- we skipped right over it and just got married. But I'll get to that later.I first met Lansing in September 1993, when we both entered the MTC, destined for Bulgaria (Lansing) and the Czech Republic (me). Neither one of us made any lasting impression on the other at first sight; it wasn't until a few days later that I took a good look at his name tag and realized his sister Clorinda had been in my dorm during our freshman year (my freshman year, that is, and Clorinda's- Lansing was but an innocent high-school child at the time.) Aside from that, we probably had a few conversations but the first one I remember was over lunch one day; I was joking around with someone else in his group and said something that made him laugh. I am always flattered when anyone finds me funny- I take it as a sign of a discerning mind- so this immediately bumped him up several notches in my personal esteem.
This is a picture we took for his sister. Notice he's doing the "I'm-not-touching-you" thing, though not entirely in accordance with the arm's-length rule.There were only a couple of other missionaries in his group, so they were in with us for most of the non-language-based activities and we had lots of opportunities to chat and get to know each other better. I couldn't tell you anything specific we discussed, just that we had an immediate comfort level with each other that was unusual for me. As I look back over the pictures of our whole group together it strikes me that he is always sitting next to me, which he informs me was not at all coincidental, but at the time I just wasn't in the "Meet Your Romantic Destiny" mindset and I didn't pick up on it.
Actually in this one he's not next to me- he's at the top, I'm 2nd from the right, standing.We wrote to each other during our missions, and traded a few tapes (tapes! can you imagine? it was like the Stone Age of communications) recorded over the audio guide to the missionary study program, and we were both guilty of some incredibly bad poetry. (Yes, this is how nerds go about trying to impress one another. Look away, it's hideous.) Anyway, I came home in February and went back to school. He finished his mission in August and called me on my birthday, the first time we'd talked in almost 2 years. A couple of weeks later he was back in Provo, and we went on our first date- a 3-day camping trip to Zion National Park. We met friends at the canyon but drove down together, and by the time we got there I was completely in love. We both had this incredibly strong sense of recognition and being 100 percent at home with each other, which neither of us had ever experienced before. We spent every possible minute together that fall, and went camping a lot, and if you look at our transcripts there is a corresponding huge dip in both of our GPA's.
Here we are on a mountain-biking trip to Moab.By Christmas, we had started making wedding plans, but due to errors of strategy on my part we made it all the way to the altar without Lansing ever actually proposing. He wanted it to be perfect, and I seemed to have a knack for derailing things at the critical moment, and one way or another it just never happened. So he owes me one!!
We got married on June 25, 1996. It was the best decision I ever made. We are just alike enough to understand each other perfectly, and just different enough to keep it interesting. And just lucky enough to have found each other.
