How I Met Your Father — eHarmony, Coffee Shops, and Porch Swing Romance is a part of a series celebrating love and marriage by telling the stories of some of our Nashville Moms Blog contributors and how they met their partners. Enjoy more of these sweet stories here!
When you get right down to it, my husband and I met through online dating (eHarmony to be exact), but there is so much more to our story. I’d been through the ugliness of a divorce, had done some (unsuccessful) dating, and then I put my best friend and my sister in charge of choosing my prospects online. I figured I hadn’t been doing a fantastic job of things, so why not let the two people who knew me best—and who I trusted most—have a shot at it? They would narrow down candidates before passing them along to me to review. What could go wrong with that plan?!
Gabe and I had enjoyed lively and flirtatious exchanges, so I was looking forward to meeting this quick-witted, entertaining, and engaging man. BUT . . . our first date went truly and horribly wrong (due to circumstances beyond our control, I promise!), and we decided to move on with other relationships—but to remain friends. For some time, we got to know each other through lessons in tiling (I volunteered to help with projects in exchange for instruction—I wanted to tile the bathrooms in my house and was completely clueless), and we met for lunch occasionally.
We dated other people, and honestly? I was totally ok with that. When we met he was pretty freshly divorced himself, and being a year ahead of him down that road, I wasn’t excited to get involved in someone else’s divorce recovery. Additionally, he wasn’t keen on the idea of more children (he had a son), and that was a deal breaker for me. I don’t think either of us gave the other much thought in the romance department after our initial disaster.
Fast forward to nearly a year later. We had each had to cancel on our lunch meet-up due to our respective job responsibilities, so we finally gave up and scheduled a dinner instead. He was working on restoring another old house. So he invited me over to check it out before we grabbed dinner together. Romance was the last thing on our minds. What neither of us knew was that we were both single again. What neither of us expected was for that evening to end with wine and kissing on the swing on his new front porch—but it did.
And, thankfully, it didn’t end there. Soon, that porch swing? It was our porch swing—because, despite all the craziness surrounding our meeting and our lives in general, that wonderful (and possibly insane) man pursued me. The following Christmas, he proposed on that very swing. We were married on the beach in South Carolina five months later. In the years since, we’ve welcomed our little boy to our family . . . and just a few months ago, we welcomed our little girl. And when we moved to (yes, you guessed it!) yet another old home—that we are now restoring together? We took that swing with us.
I love the life we’ve built together. I love our real life romance. And I will always love a good porch swing.
