The first time you saw your spouse was the beginning.
Maybe you saw her across the room in biology class. Maybe you saw him working out at the gym. Maybe you worked together on the same project at work. At some point, you had a beginning. There was an attraction to each other. Maybe your eyes connected in the hallway. Maybe you flirted with each other at the coffee shop. There was a moment in your relationship that the world stopped for just a millisecond and your heart skipped a beat.
THAT moment was the beginning.
The initial attraction led to another beginning…the first date.
What will I wear? Where will we go? I need to clean my car out. I hope his car doesn’t stink like a gym locker. Do I buy her flowers? Should I open the car door for her? I hope she likes Mexican food. I hope we don’t eat Mexican food.
You have your own memories of your first date. Your first date was the beginning of your story.
Our first date was 18 years ago today. It was the beginning of our love story.
We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Rio Bravo. After dinner we went to see the movie Apt Pupil. If you have seen Apt Pupil and enjoyed it, we apologize for this next statement.
IT WAS HORRIBLE.
We left before it was over and as we left the theater, it was pouring rain. While waiting for the rain to calm down so we could leave, we witnessed a car crash head on into a light pole in the parking lot! No one was hurt and we still laugh about it to this day.
We laugh quite a bit about our first date. We laugh about the automatic seatbelts in the 1993 Acura Integra. We laugh about the choice of Mexican cuisine for a first date. We laugh about the movie that we didn’t complete. We laugh about the pouring rain and how we both looked like drowned rats once we made it back to the car.
From that moment of our first date, we have experienced so much in the past 18 years. We have graduated from colleges, moved four times, have had nine jobs, driven six different cars, two cats, two dogs, bought a boat, sold a boat, said goodbye to one of the cats and one of the dogs, and had two kids.
It is a lot of fun to think back to the beginning of our relationship.
Today we will talk about our first date and the fun memories from that moment.
What about the beginning of your relationship?
During our weekend marriage conferences and our marriage mentoring program, we spend a lot of time talking about the beginnings of a relationship. We talk about the importance of remembering things such as your first date.
What if you took 15 minutes tonight and talked about your first date?
Where did your eyes meet for the first time? Who asked who out on the first date? Were you nervous? Where did you go? What did you do?
We live in a world of busy schedules and it is often difficult to slow down long enough to think about today, let alone think about something in the past. Tonight, hit the pause button on today and talk about yesterday. Talk about the time that your love story began with your first date.
Doing life together,
Bryan & Shayla