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A 100-year-old photo from our engagement session
As I mentioned in this post, my husband and I just celebrated our 10-year anniversary, and I’m sharing the story of how I fell in love with him.
Clay and I met just a couple of weeks after a four-year, serious relationship ended with my Australian boyfriend, Adam. Adam and I went to high school together in Brisbane and dated from our junior year until after I had moved back to America for college and did the long, long distance relationship thing for over a year. We crossed the ocean to visit each other a few times, but in the end, the strain was too much and we agreed it was time to give other relationships a try.
I didn’t expect that other relationship to come about so soon. But about two weeks later, I was in my college apartment with my best friend, Karlee, and her phone rang while she was in the bathroom. I answered it for her and it was Clay, the boy I had known of because of mutual friends, but I didn’t know him personally. For some reason, I ended up inviting him to a party I was having at my parents, who were out of town. He came, backed up by a group of five of his close friends. At the end of the night, I gave a hug to each of his friends, and Clay was last in line. We talked about how he was going down to BYU to play soccer and go to college soon and I would be going there too . . . I felt like he was trying to get at something, like my phone number, so I helped him out a bit with a “We should hang out!” We exchanged the numbers to our Nokia bricks. That’s how old we are.
A few days later, I came home from work to a message from Clay wishing me a happy birthday. He later told me he had strategically called me when he knew I wouldn’t be home so the ball would be in my court and he could see if I was interested enough to call him back. I did, after being debriefed by Karlee that he had probed her with questions about me — specifically if I was dating anyone. When he heard that I wasn’t, he said he planned to ask me out. Again, I made it easy on him and we had our first date set up.
It was super fancy. Milkshakes at a podunk diner called “Big B”s” that is long gone. I remember eating my raspberry shake and slowly becoming infatuated with this athletic, blonde-haired, blue eyed, All-American boy’s dimpled smile. But when he took me home at 9 p.m. sharp, I thought something must have gone wrong. He says he just wanted to leave me wanting more, but I suspect he was still adjusting to normal life after two years of observing strict curfews as a missionary for the LDS church in Brazil, which he’d come home from just a month prior.
Either way, I was left wanting more. As he drove away, he pulled out this smooth one: “Call me if you get bored.” I was smitten. No, but really, there was something about this homegrown blondie that intrigued me.
When I got home from the date, I remember feeling that floaty, giddy feeling when you become interested in someone new. But I also felt a little mad. Mad that this kid could have such an effect on me so quickly, and that I was already falling for his charms so soon after a breakup, when I intended to enjoy being single and take my time.
But, somehow I still found myself Googling him, driving by his house . . . you know, the normal stuff you do when you meet a guy. Every time we went out, someone was saying, “Clay!” My Googling prowess had revealed that he was a bit of a soccer star, so I chalked it up to that and to how friendly and handsome he was.
Well, one thing Clay did take his sweet time with was kissing me for the first time. We had been dating for a solid two months. We were sitting on his couch after watching a movie and he said something like, “I want to kiss you, but I’ve been nervous. But I want to.” I said something like, “Let’s get this freaking show on the road,” and there it was. We sort of just needed to get that one out of the way, because the kisses just got better and better after that. I’ll spare you the juicy details.
I’m very proud of the fact that I said “I love you” first, about five months after we started dating. I knew I loved him, and although my old-fashioned-dating-rules pride tried to hold out for him to say it first, I felt like I would burst if I held it in much longer. And as I expressed so poetically in my journal at 21 years old, “Better out than in, right?” So, out came “I love you” and a quick disclaimer that he didn’t need to say anything back. Well, he did, and kiss, kiss, smooch, smooch, yada yada.
Fast forward two months, after the time I went to weekly “taco night” at Del Taco with his family and spilled water all over my pants, and after the time I got the sacred invite to his family’s annual Lake Powell trip, to a moment I’ll never forget with Clay. We were lying on the grass at a park and Clay was being cute and stroking my hair. Don’t worry, I recorded all the dialogue in my dear diary:
“Kim?” He said.
“What?”
“You know I’m going to ask you to marry me someday, right?”
My heart did a back handspring. I looked at him and said,
“I hope so. But I didn’t know that. Are you sure? You might change your mind.”
“You might change your mind.”
“No, no I wont. You can kick me out of your house at midnight, but that’s about it.” (Thank you, BYU curfew!)
Clay proposed to me a couple of months later on a pretty little tennis court (we played a lot of tennis together) with a poem he had written and had translated into French, which I was studying at the time. We had a 6-month engagement, and although saying goodbye to each other every night got old, I loved being engaged and feeling the excited anticipation of getting married.
It rained torrentially on our wedding day, but as I’ve mentioned before, I love the rain, so it only made the day better for me. Maybe not for the people who were frantically moving tables and chairs from my parents’ backyard into the house. But anyway. The day we were married and our surprise honeymoon to Hawaii (which I didn’t find out about until the night before we left) are a couple of times we will always reminisce about.
People always tell you before you get married that you’re going to learn all these “secrets” and flaws about your spouse that you were either blind to or that were hidden from you before you got hitched. And I’m not just trying to paint an unrealistic picture of marital perfection. We have our trials. But the only “secrets” that I have uncovered about Clay in the years after our wedding day is that he is even more caring and selfless than I knew then. I, on the other hand, more than make up for whatever flaws he doesn’t have with the many I have. For real.
