Engaged

So, as many of you may have noticed on my Facebook page, my relationship status went from Single to It’s Complicated a couple of months ago. Early this morning it went to Engaged, and this post is here to provide the details that many of you have asked for.

It’s important that I take a minute and give a bit of background on where I was when this semester started, for the sake of context. I had been laid off from Kroll Factual Data in December, and with 16 credits remaining for the completion of my Master’s degree, I decided not to look for another job and instead focus on knocking out those credits. So this semester was a true overload for me – full time grad school courseload is 9 credits, so I was nearly doubling that. Going into the semester I was pretty unhappy with my program overall and had no idea what I was going to do once the Master’s was complete; continue to a PhD or just enter the workforce with the Master’s. This semester allowed me to see what my academic potential truly was – without the distraction and time investment of a job, I was able to throw myself entirely at my studies for the first time ever, and the results were amazing. So as the semester was coming to a close, I was really beginning to believe in my ability in this field for the first time.

Who Is She?

If I were to have made a list of attributes I desired in the “perfect-for-me” woman and put that list into the computer from Weird Science, instead of getting Kelly LeBrock out of the machine, it would have given me Jen Davis. This woman has wit, attitude, character, ambition, accomplishment, beauty, and the kind of intellect that can only be described as Fucking Brilliant. Jen’s mind is as hyperactive as mine, but she’s put it to greater use than I have; while I was busy rocking the video game scene, Jen was working on a career as an elementary special education teacher, and after 9 years in that capacity, she began pursuing graduate studies at UNC.

In the two years she’s been in the PhD program she has not only excelled in her coursework, Jen has been an inspiration to many of her fellow students; her drive, dedication, and critical mind have propelled her to the lofty (unofficial) position of The Standard – Jen is the person that other graduate students want to be. She’s just completed her written comprehensive exams, and will be undergoing the oral defense of those answers on June 18th, after which she will be ABD – All But Dissertation. She’s got a rock solid idea for her dissertation study and she’s already piloting the instrument for that, and her timeline for being finished with the dissertation and defending it is next spring, April if I recall correctly.

If this were not enough to garner my interest in Jen, she also has character strength the likes of which I’ve never known before. She has gone through a number of difficult trials in her life; she battled cancer in her early 20’s, which left her sans-thyroid. She struggled with obesity for the majority of her life until two years ago, when she walked into the Slim 4 Life location in Loveland; nine months later she had shed 140 lbs and had made the changes in her life that would contribute to keeping that weight off long-term. I will leave the telling of these stories to Jen, because I would never be able to do them justice. I will say that the strength it takes to overcome these difficult challenges is something that shows through in the way Jen talks, laughs, and lives her life.

It’s not a lighthearted comment I make when I say that Jen Davis is perfect for me. She possesses every character trait I could have hoped to find in a woman, and some that I didn’t even know I wanted.

The “How We Met” Story

I remember the minutes leading up to the first day of SRM 641: Mixed Methods very clearly. I had arrived in the classroom early because the class I had right before that had been released significantly early. I found my customary position – very front of the class along the right wall. This room was interesting because it didn’t have those God-awful desks that leave a cramp in my back after a 3-hour class. Instead, this room was four rows of tables with six or eight chairs per row. There were only 12 people in the class – pretty typical for SRM classes. I was watching as people came filing into the room, taking mental notes of who I’d be sharing the class with over the semester. I recognized a couple of folks: Randy Larkins, a man I’ve come to have a great deal of respect and admiration for, and Eric Teman, someone I had two other classes with earlier in the week.

That’s when Jen walked in. One of the last people to arrive for the class, she had a wide, genuine smile on her face, carried herself with such confidence that my ears, if they were a bit longer and more pointed, would have stood at attention. I was immediately interested in her based on the combination of her confident gait, that broad smile, and her honest-to-God classical beauty – she looked like Audrey Hepburn. She took a seat directly behind me, which was both a blessing and a curse – for one, I couldn’t really look at her without being completely obvious about it, but that position meant that she’d be in close proximity for the entirety of the semester, affording opportunities for conversation in the future.

Shortly after this grand entrance we were going through the introduction phase of all graduate level college classes – “Hello, my name is Sunny, I’m in the Master’s program for Applied Statistics and Research Methods, and my interests are butterflies, puppies, rainbows, and doing large calculations by hand.” This exercise was the first opportunity I had to hear Jen’s voice, and I have to admit, I was absolutely entranced. I turned around in my chair and looked directly at her while she was telling her story, and every word that came out of her mouth was like another drop of honey-mead.

It was also during this introduction that I noticed the ring on her finger – a crushing blow if ever I’d encountered one. Upon noticing this tiny little problem (tiny like a black hole, that is), I immediately placed Jen, mentally, in my “Do Not Disturb” file. The last thing I wanted to do was come between this amazing woman and her husband – who by my reckoning must be a combination of the best parts from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Albert Einstein, Erik Erickson, Sean Connery, Sting, and Antonio Banderas. I mean, this amazing creature could not possibly have a relationship with anyone less than the “perfect” man, in my eyes.

So for the next few weeks I approached my interactions with Jen through this lens. I got to hear more about her, discovered that she was extremely accomplished – three publications already and a book in the works, and she’s still in her PhD coursework. I heard her tell her story about battling obesity, which I found to be incredibly moving and gave her an added level of strength in my mind. I got to hear about her perspective on a number of topics, and every time she spoke, she did so with passion and conviction. I grew to really admire and respect this woman, and as the semester was coming to a close I knew that I wanted to approach her about getting her contact information in the hopes that we would be able to build a healthy friendship based on academic interests. I envisioned the kind of relationship where we would share research ideas, maybe edit rough drafts for each other, that kind of thing.

Three weeks before the end of the semester the class was doing a dry-run of a project proposal, essentially the culmination of our semester’s worth of work. The next week we would be presenting our proposals in front of a mock dissertation committee consisting of Dr. Susan Hutchinson, the department chair for the ASRM department, Dr. Maria Lehman, the ASRM department’s resident qualitative research expert, and Veronica Richard, an ABD doctoral student in the ASRM department. Dr. Geist – Monica – wanted us to have a chance to run through our presentations before hand, so we took the majority of this class period doing exactly that. I remember Jen coming into class that day – she seemed distraught, something wasn’t right. As she took her seat behind me, I lip-synched “are you OK?” to her, and her non-verbal response was completely unconvincing. However, in true Jen style, she shelved her personal issues and focused on the task at hand. My classmates got up and gave their presentations, with time for comments on how to improve the layout or design being offered by the rest of us throughout the evening.

Jen’s presentation was great. Rock solid performance fueled by a complete understanding of the background material and understanding of what she wanted to accomplish, and how to get there. Her materials, however, could use some work – she had cut out shapes that, when used in conjunction with the overhead projector, went together like a jigsaw puzzle as she moved through the presentation. It was truly original in concept, but in practice I thought it was a bit messy because the little pieces kept moving when she added another, and it made keeping the entire map on the document camera a trying experience for her.

After the class was over I turned around in my chair and leaned over her table and said that I could help her with that problem. I explained that if she emailed me the Word document the original was based on, I could import it into a Powerpoint presentation, and even make it so that each of the puzzle pieces added sequentially, just like her paper version, but without the stress of keeping the pieces straight. Jen asked if I could just show her how to do it; I would find out later this was because she’s not the kind of person who likes to ask for help – she wants to do it herself. I loaded her Word file onto my laptop and quickly ran through the concept I had in mind, showing her how she could do what we were talking about. She was very excited about it and thanked me for the help. I was concerned that she may not be able to get it to work properly without some coaching, so I gave her my email, in case she wanted to send it to me so I could work on it, and I gave her my phone number, in case she wanted to call me to let me know she was sending the email. It is interesting to note that even Monica urged Jen to just let me do it, because Jen was under so much stress from so many other angles just then, and I assured them both that it would really only take me a matter of 20 minutes or so to take care of it.

Sure enough, in the 40 minutes it took me to drive home from campus, Jen had emailed me her files and asked if I wouldn’t mind putting the presentation together for her. She asked me to let her know if it was going to take too long – 30 minutes later, I emailed her the finished product along with my assurance that it had been very simple to do, and that I was happy to have relieved some of her stress.

The next night, at approximately 9:00 pm, I got a text message – “Whatcha doin?” I have to admit that I grinned from ear to ear when I read that text. In the interest of sparing my readers the details of the next 4 hours of text messages and online conversation via Facebook’s chat feature, I will simply say that this initial text message was like holding a match over an exposed propane tank – and then using a butane lighter to light the match. In the week between that night and our presentations the following Wednesday, I think we averaged 4 hours of sleep per night, and again, in the interest of sparing the reader, I will simply say that we did what all aspiring couples did – shared our hopes, dreams, fears, and thoughts – often in intimate detail. One thing became increasingly clear to me – I had, at last, found The One.

The One

I asked my mom, not long ago, about how she met my dad. For clarification, I’m talking about my step-father, Terry, who adopted me at the age of 8 and who has been the ideal father to me throughout my life – I don’t refer to the other guy at all, unless the topic is specifically brought up. Anyhow, my mother told me that from the time that she and dad started dating until they were married, 7 months had passed. This news was, frankly, shocking. My mother has always cautioned me on going slow in a relationship, taking my time, all of that kind of thing. To hear her say that her own courtship lasted less than one academic year was pretty surprising. She went on to explain that even before that, dad had agreed to do some farm work for my Grandpa Donnelly, and that he had walked up to the front door to the house to ask for clarification on which plot of land was to be worked on. Mom answered the door and she told me that she said to herself, as she watched him turn around and walk back down the steps, that she was “going to marry that man.”

As many of you know, I’m an avid movie watcher, and unlike most men, I’m comfortable enough with my sexuality to admit that I like romantic movies, or Chick Flicks as they’re called. I’ve seen dozens of them, and own more than 20. The one thing that most romantic movies have in common is that the love portrayed in them is that quick-fire, intense, passionate love that makes you reflect on your own relationships and come to the conclusion that the stories told in those movies are bullshit – nobody ever feels like that, nobody ever experiences that, that’s not how it works. As a society, we shun the notions of love-at-first-sight or soul mates destined to be together. In these movies, the two lead characters have found their version of The One, but of course, this only happens in Hollywood…right?

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you, I’m a believer. Line up the most corny lines from any chick flick and I’m going to be inclined to agree with them – from Jerry McGuire’s “You complete me” to “Is it too late to say I love you” from Playing By Heart, every tear-inducing, sap filled statement from these movies is a little more believable now.

My friend Bobby and I were having a conversation a few weeks ago. He had asked me if I thought I’d end up marrying Jen. I gave it a little bit of thought – the hesitation being more because I was trying to decide what to tell him, more than any doubt in my mind about the answer here – and finally said yes, that I was going to marry her. He told me that he could see that, and that when you know something like that, there’s no real reason to wait. This is something that Jen herself had actually mentioned – she said that she felt like we were inevitable, and when something is inevitable, what’s the point in putting it off?

The truth is, I’ve never known anyone like Jen. She is a truly rare and unique woman, and that she feels the way she does about me is both moving and inspiring. I held her in the highest regard well before I talked to her on a personal level, and that foundation of respect has been an excellent one for the somewhat rapid construction we’ve placed upon it. I can honestly say that Jen understands me in ways that very few people have been able to understand me – Trish Wakeford, Mike Wilkinson, and my mother pretty much conclude that list. Jen inspires me as an academic and challenges me intellectually, and she makes me want to do more than simply see my own potential – she makes me want to achieve it.

Many people would have warning signals – flashing red lights and loud, ringing klaxons – sending an alert about the speed with which this relationship has progressed. I have to admit, both Jen and I have discussed that if one of our friends were to tell us this story, we’d be supportive, but very cautionary. I mean, it’s supposed to take time, right? So for those of you who are questioning that very thing, allow me to assure you that we are both completely certain that what we’re doing is not only right for us, but it is inevitable.

The Wedding

When we initially started talking about a wedding (in a hypothetical manner), Jen insisted that because she’d already had her wedding, she would prefer that my desires be paramount for a wedding, when the time came. After some thought and reflection, and a bit of information on what her first wedding had been, I pointed out that it didn’t really seem like it had been “her” wedding at all – the theme was not her idea, and it wasn’t really anything she was overly interested in. She thought about that for a moment and conceded the point. As such, I pointed out, our wedding should be everything that she missed the first time around – and paramount among those things that are most important to her is that we get married by water. Not a little bit of water, either – lots and lots of water.

Jen grew up on the east coast, most of her family is there, and for that reason, we’ve decided to have the wedding ceremony on the east coast. Because of timing (Jen’s career plans, my continued studies, and so on), the earliest we can see having something the way we really want it would be over the summer break of 2011. We’re both set on having a ceremony on the east coast somewhere in that time frame, but we’re also of the opinion that we’re not for waiting that long, and so we’re going to have a very small, very private ceremony here in Colorado in December of this year (we’re thinking New Year’s Eve, actually). The guest list is going to be extremely limited, so I have to ask forgiveness of those not invited to the ceremony – if it were possible, I’d invite every single one of you. However, rest assured that the invitation to the ceremony on the east coast will be forthcoming.