The Story of Us Part 1 // You Can Stand Under my Umbrella
This might be my favorite blog post yet. It's the story of how my fiancé and I met. For the shorter version we usually tell, feel free to start at the ***.
Janice: I moved to SF in April 2016, and started attending Reality SF, a large, nondenominational church filled primarily with millennials, soon after. I prayed a lot about the church God wanted me to attend, and the day I committed to attending Reality long-term, I was actually planning to attend another church. For some reason, I felt God tell me to go to Reality that morning, to get there early, and to sit in the front. So I did.
That’s where I met Chris, who invited me to join a group of them for lunch. At the lunch, I re-met Marty, whose house I had actually considered moving into, and who was a leader of the Community Group (CG) Soma 1.
I think it took me a couple weeks, but I finally decided to attend the Soma 1 CG, which took place in Michia & Marty’s office (they are cofounders of a startup). This was the first time I met Michia (my now-fiancé) who opened the gate for some of us waiting outside.
I attended two or three Soma 1 CG’s while Michia was still there, but we never really chatted, beyond a brief introduction. Then I left for a summer vacation, and when I came back, Michia had moved from Soma 1 to our sister CG, Fidi 2 (people joke he only switched CG's in order to date me, but he denies it).
Still, I saw him on occasion because we all hung out as one big group. The first time I began to be interested was sometime maybe late August? in Casa Mexicana, a Mexican restaurant we used to go to occasionally after church. This was the first extended conversation Michia and I had, and I found him fascinating.
Michia: I remember sitting next to Janice and thinking she was really cute, but I had a strict no CG-dating rule, so I kept my blinders on and focused all of my affection on my steak fajita burrito.
Janice: I missed his birthday that year because I had something else, but attended his housewarming / birthday party, where I briefly met his mom and coworkers. By this point, I found him cute, interesting, and definitely dateable.
*** Here’s where we usually start. ***
Janice: We were leaving church as a group one day, late October, and it was raining. I had no umbrella, but Michia was kind enough to share his, for our walk to lunch. As we walked, we talked, and he asked to get the Windows prerelease version of the product I work(ed) on, Adobe XD. I told him that in order to do that, he would need my contact info, so we exchanged numbers. He couldn’t join for lunch that day, so we parted ways, but almost immediately began texting.
Michia: I really did get her number with the intention of getting XD and nothing more. But as soon as I said goodbye I realized I already missed her. I think I started texting her before her food even arrived.
Janice: Haha, he did. I quickly realized I really missed him, too, and our texts were definitely flirtatious. However, neither of us believed in dating within the CG, as it often ends poorly and with lots of drama. So when he asked me out for drinks on Thursday, we made it clear it was a "non-date" (date).
Thursday nears, and I realize it’s silly to do just drinks and not also dinner, so I asked him if we could do dinner, too. He proposed Izakaya Roku, a cute Japanese teppanyaki restaurant near his (now old) place.
That Thursday, we talked non-stop for three hours over dinner, then another two+ hours over drinks. I had never had that happen on a first date, and I knew we clicked better than I had with almost anyone else, ever.
Michia: I could tell right away something was different with Janice. It seemed like even in the first few days of us texting we were reading each other’s minds and despite our insistence of it being a “non-date” I think we both were feeling anything but platonic by the time Thursday came.
Janice: We talked about everything, from childhood, to travel, to current hobbies, and even our relationship. I believe in dating for marriage, and I knew that this was especially important for us because we were in the same community at church. People ask all the time when we first talked about marriage, and we always say, "our first date." I told Michia that if he wanted to keep dating me, he had to understand this and read Timothy Keller's The Meaning of Marriage. At the time, he was reading Modern Romance, by Aziz Ansari, so he promised he'd read Keller if I read Ansari. It was a deal.
Michia: I was impressed by Janice’s straightforwardness and how much she knew what she wanted out of life. I’ve always been that way and seeing that spirit inside her made me actually want to read the book and understand what she’s looking for more. Of course, I held up my end of the bargain, but it took her months to read my book!
Janice: I did eventually read it. Anyway, as promised, I brought him The Meaning of Marriage on our second date (that Saturday). The next day (a week after we had started texting), we went to Dinosaurs for lunch as a community group, and, despite having decided to keep our budding relationship on the DL, were called out by several of our friends. It was pretty obvious we were seriously infatuated.
Michia: I like to think we were pretty sneaky, but my best friend Ralph called me out super hard and another friend Leonard immediately laughed and said he had already figured it out before Dinosaurs, it was so obvious. Needless to say, there was no hiding it from anyone. We were smitten and anyone around us could tell.
Janice: Haha, Chris says we were giving each other "googly eyes." Given how compatible we were, our relationship progressed incredibly quickly, and we confessed we loved each other Week 3, maybe Week 4. I just knew, deep in my heart and spirit, that this was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
Michia: We kept waiting for the “honeymoon phase” to end, but it never did. Even writing this 814 days later, we’re just as excited, in love, and absolutely thrilled to be doing life together as we were in those first few weeks.
