How They Met
Part 1 of an ongoing series about how significant relationships began. Would love to hear your story!
You probably have a couple stories about significant people in your life, centred around the way you met and fell in love, or friendship, or co-dependency. I am fascinated by those stories, not only because they shed light on current relationships I observe, but also because they usually occurred long ago and give me a glimpse into who my friends were, long before I knew them. With any luck you’ll also find these stories fun and interesting and yes please to receiving yours! This is my biggest ask from all of you: please tell me how you met someone significant to you. It doesn’t have to be a partner and, in fact, two of the three I’m featuring this week are friend stories.
The first two stories are linked as they both occurred at university and both came about despite negative first impressions, so two cautionary tales about being too quick to judge. These have been very lightly edited!
My story relates to one of my oldest friends, whom I met on day one at uni. For context, he is one of a group of buddies that I have stayed in touch with for 40 years and meet once a year for a ridiculously expensive dinner and drinks. It’s a feature of geology students that they tend to bond, because you spend so much of your spare time together, and then go on to meet in obscure bars in obscure airports in obscure parts of the world.
On day 1, Mike and I were put in a shared room at a hall of residence in London. He was from an eastern England farming family, who’d only been to London on school trips. I was a total city boy who’d grown up in a hermetically-sealed immigrant community. We literally had nothing to say to each other and had absolutely nothing in common. I’m not sure how we survived the first 6 months. We both disliked uni, disliked the people around us and said nothing to each other. Just looked at each other in silence. Very, very gradually the ice broke. It took a long time, well beyond the one year that we shared a room. We discovered that we actually had a lot in common - shared interests, shared views. We’ve stayed in touch through various ups and downs in our lives.
It may be a generalisation, but today, social media drives you to rapid judgements and towards your own bubble. There is neither the patience nor the tolerance required to scratch deeper and see if a relationship is worth developing. Instant and immovable judgements seem to dominate.
Maybe I’m wrong - I actually hope I’m wrong!
This friendship didn’t take as long to develop but it started in a similar vein of judgement and negative predispositions.
Back in 1973, I entered university on the other side of the country from where I grew up and moved into student resident housing. It was an exciting and scary time — not knowing a soul and having to start to navigate new friendships. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around I had managed to meet a nice girl who invited me to go home with her for the holiday. Upon returning to residence at the end of the long weekend, I found the gossip mill in full force. A new student had moved onto our floor while most of us were away. All the female residents had something to say. As soon as I caught a glimpse of the new girl, I added my voice to the chorus of negative opinions. Sheesh!!! She was sashaying down the hall, wearing daisy dukes and striped knee socks. She was gorgeous, and was exuding an air of confidence that none of the rest of us in our late teens had. Every guy on our floor (we lived in coed housing) was ogling her and vying for her attention. I made up my mind there and then that she wasn’t someone I wanted to get to know. I don’t remember when all of that changed, but I have a photo taken at our residence Christmas party a couple of months later where I’m wearing a dress she lent me for the occasion. Over the following months she became my dearest friend and, fifty-one years later, still holds that honour.
So much for first impressions…
This story is more along the lines of what you think of when you think about how people met and it reflects the common experience that your first spouse isn’t the one that makes the biggest, or lasting, impression.
In 1979, my then husband, Jim, accepted a corporate move to a tiny town west of London, Ontario (note, without my knowledge or consent). Thus, at age 23, I moved over 200k away from my family, friends, former classmates--everyone I knew and loved--for the first time in my life. I had two little girls, 3 and 8 months, my marriage was faltering, my husband traveled most weeks on business, and I knew no one in the town. It was isolating and very lonely. The only person I got to know slightly was a woman who worked in the local craft supply shop. When she asked me if I would be interested in taking a non-credit 'intro to cabinetmaking' course at the college in London with her (mostly because I had a car to get there, and she did not), I immediately said yes. I was not especially interested in learning to make furniture, but I WAS interested in developing the friendship!
I promptly forgot that I had agreed to register us both for the course, and when I finally remembered and called, it was full. The clerk said, though, that they were taking names for an additional offering, to run on alternate evenings. A week later I got a call saying we were now registered in the additional section. This detail is important because the new section was taught by none other than a guy named Frank. If I had remembered to call, we would have been in the original class and I would never have met him. So for six weeks, my new friend and I drove to London for a 3 hour night class, twice a week. By the end of it, it was clear to me that there was some chemistry going on--but I thought the chemistry was between Frank and my gorgeous (and single) friend! What a surprise when, at the party after the last night of class, he confessed his attraction to me. What was most important to me was that I felt he truly saw ME, the unique person, and wanted to know everything about me!
Yes, I was married--and so was he. But we were both unhappy in our marriages and had both been considering ending them. We met clandestinely for another six weeks and one night in November we agreed that we would leave our spouses in the new year (not wanting to disrupt Christmas for our children. That very night, however, BOTH of our spouses confronted us (separately, of course), demanding to know what was going on--and we both confessed. By the next morning, we were living together.
We are still together--and today is our 43rd anniversary.
There are so many songs about falling in love and separate songs about friendship but never the twain shall meet. I’ve chosen Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend” because it can bridge those significant relationships AND it was released in 1975 so I think we’re in the ballpark for the stories above.
Let me know if you have other musical recommendations I can use for upcoming posts in this series.
Until next time, tell your best friends how much they mean to you!