Our Story
An Unexpected Meeting
Kevin says...
It was the evening of 16 November, 2021 that I encountered Athennia's online profile. She hadn't said much about herself—only 34 words, actually—but, among what little she had said were confessed proclivities for intelligence, music, and trust. And, of course, a picture...
As she was relatively local to me and I'm rather partial to intelligence, music, and trust as well, I decided I'd write to her and say hi...
But, it was getting late: I'd never have time to draft... and craft... and polish an irresistible hello message before my brain started to unwind and force me to go to sleep.
So, I made a note to do it tomorrow.
And, I did: It took me most of the day to compose; but, at 9:08 P.M. on 17 November 2021, I paper-airplaned a two-page hello in the direction of Athennia's inbox...
Then, within the hour, I promptly came down with something decidedly Common Cold-19-like (I'm honestly not sure what it was), and I climbed into bed hoping I wouldn't be sick for Thanksgiving and completely lose my voice for two weeks.
Spoiler alert: I was. And I did.
"Okay, I'll Bite..."
Athennia says...
The night that Kevin messaged me had been just another night to me... Same, thing, different day. I had been on that dating site about a month at that point—and was ready to be done with it, having hit my tolerance level for the men there and their tired "hey babe" introductions.
So, I rolled my eyes when my phone gave me the notification that I'd received yet another new message. But when I clicked through to view it, I could tell immediately that this wasn't just more of the same uninspired tripe to which I'd grown so accustomed.
I was instantly intrigued by just the subject line alone!
Intelligence, Music, and Trust? Okay, I'll Bite...
Okay, he'll bite? I read it as a challenge... and opened the message to find an 18-paragraph message waiting for me! (I was yet to encounter a man who could even be bothered to express himself in complete sentences. This man was using paragraphs?)
My first thought as I read his message was that I absolutely had to respond to this remarkable stranger and get to know him better: His wit. His humor. His articulateness. But, I had been awake nearly 24 hours at that point, and had just returned from driving up to Connecticut and back (a six-hour round trip). I was exhausted beyond the point of rational thought, and it took everything I had just to muster up a brief response letting Kevin know I had thoroughly enjoyed his message and would respond in full at my earliest convenience.
I didn't realize how pitiful that message actually was until I looked at it again the next day. As Kevin confided in me some weeks later...
That first response really threw me: I thought, she's either very tired, very drunk, not the intellectual she purported to be, or the proverbial "D.) all of the above." Fortunately, it was only the first!
I wrote back to him in full the next evening and received a response that he had read it and was eager to write back... but he had mysteriously come down with something last night and was feeling under the weather, so he might need an extra day or two.
Okay. Maybe he really was sick. Or maybe he had decided he wasn't so interested after all and was "getting sick" as a means of creating distance between us. I had no means of knowing either way, so I told him I hoped he felt better, and I secretly hoped that our small start of a conversation wasn't too good to be true.
But, to my delight, he followed up with another voluminous message two days later. We spent a week volleying messages back and forth, with each one he sent being impeccably composed and enchantingly engaging, even in spite of how lousy he kept claiming to feel!
Even though he had explained that he was a writer, I felt a definite self-consciousness trying to match his presentation: His style. His grammar. The sheer length of his correspondence. Typing out everything I wanted to say to him would have taken far more time than I had, and writing at his level wasn't my forte anyway!
I kept mentioning that I much preferred speaking and desperately wanted to talk with him on the phone to be able to express myself more fluently. But, even two weeks later, when he finally announced that he had just started to feel better, he insisted that he had completely lost his voice.
So, talking on the phone would have to wait... And, even when he was ready (whenever that would be), he had a "no unencrypted phone calls" policy: If I wanted to talk to him, I'd have to put some app I'd never heard of on my phone!
What?!
Pushing the Envelope
Kevin says...
I forget exactly when I finally got my voice back. Years had passed. Decades even. I do remember that it was on Black Friday that I realized I was taking a gamble by continuing to brush off Athennia's requests to talk on the phone: Though I still genuinely could barely speak, I knew she had no way of knowing at that point whether I was who I'd said I was in text... and I was too intrigued to want to risk losing her over something as trivial as being seemingly unwilling to talk on the phone (no matter how legitimate my purported reason).
Compounding my fear was the reality that I had absolutely no interest in "talking on the phone" the way most people tend to do: Anyone with even an elementary understanding of how our centralized modern communications networks are knows that making an ordinary phone call is akin to mailing a postcard... It's not just you and your conversational partner who are privy to the exchange: It's your corrupt government, your snoopy mailman, the pesky neighbor kid, and God knows who else.
I wouldn't dream of sending a thinking of you card or a racy valentine without sealing it in an envelope to protect it from prying eyes; and, as an introvert with a technical background, I had no interest in sharing personal thoughts over an open line without placing those sentiments in a digital envelope, for the same reason.
That's not to say I wasn't beyond eager to converse further or bare my soul to someone who had earned my trust. I was!
...Just not to anyone else.
But, therein lay the rub: I now had to tell this woman point-blank that, if she wanted to talk on the phone with me, I'd have to insist on a solution that would protect us. I had to convince her to jump through yet another hoop (after she had so patiently waited for my voice to return) and download some app she'd never heard of—all while she still had zero confirmation that I was who I claimed to be!
So, I leveled with her...
I told her about an app called Signal that makes end-to-end encrypted calls that no one but the conversants can listen in on.
I warned her that, as a rule, installing an unfamiliar app at a stranger's behest could potentially be a huge security risk—and thus encouraged her to conduct her own research to verify that Signal was safe and legitimate, rather than blindly trusting me when she objectively had no way to know yet whether I deserved that trust.
And, I explained "in layman's terms" how using Signal would protect our privacy—and why that was something not to take for granted. As I summarized for her over email at the time...
I won't try to succinctly explain how cryptography works, fascinating though it may be to me. Instead, just imagine two Icelandic people walking through the Oxford Valley Mall: The mall's packed, and everyone's standing shoulder-to-shoulder; so, it's impossible to have a private conversation... unless, of course, you happen to speak a language that nobody around you understands... in which case, talk away! That's basically what cryptography does.
Finally, I acknowledged that she had to be at least mildly curious what I looked like; so, I threw a handful of pictures up on one of my websites that I wasn't really using at the time and sent her the link.
...Aaaaand, she ghosted me.
No response for nearly a week... Either I'd been too demanding, or she thought I was ugly. And, it didn't seem likely that I'd ever find out which. <shrug>
Busy Signal
Athennia says...
I was more than a bit frustrated when Kevin's message came through asking me to download some app I'd never heard of. But, he explained his reasoning (and Signal's functionality) so clearly and politely—even going so far as to explicitly highlight that neither his clarity nor his politeness were necessarily tantamount to actual trustworthiness...
In other words, he might be the most trustworthy guy in the world, but he knew that I didn't possess the knowledge to definitively make that call yet one way or the other. So, rather than asking me to prematurely trust him and put this app on my phone, he merely asked that I invest a few minutes to Google it and read about it on my own—from whatever sources I chose—and then make the decision myself about whether or not to put Signal on my phone.
I found no shortage of press coverage outlining Signal's legitimacy and justifiable benefits for everyone from political activists seeking to evade persecution by oppressive regimes, right down to otherwise "ordinary" individuals who just wanted to take steps to preserve some of their privacy. (And, as a woman, and a mother, and an introvert, and a technical professional myself, it certainly wasn't as if I had no concept or appreciation for privacy, even if I might not ponder it as regularly or as deliberately as Kevin clearly seemed to!) I put Signal on my phone that same night.
And I loved the pictures Kevin had sent me! My favorite was the one where he was holding his one-year-old niece Olivia... They were looking at each other instead of at the camera, and I felt like Kevin's sincere and heartfelt smile in that photo was a true snapshot of who he was.
My second favorite was a photo of Kevin and Penny (when they were living in the Caribbean a year prior: he was quick to assure me he did not have salmon colored walls and guacamole bed sheets at present time).
I also happened to be incredibly busy this particular week. I was working 11-hour days, heading right from work to help out out at my mom's, and trying to hold down a household with three kids (my two and Taylor's girlfriend) who had incidentally just lost their favorite pet.
Finding even a half hour to get back to Kevin always felt just 5-10 minutes away, but it never seemed to come. In the back of my mind, I knew a couple days had passed since he had sent me pictures and written about Signal, but I was flabbergasted when he sent me a message rebuking me for what he interpreted as me ignoring him. He was always crystal clear in his messages, and this one was no exception:
So... "I look forward to talking later" followed by five days of radio silence has been an unexpected plot twist: I sincerely hope you're okay and there's not some serious issue that has kept you from responding all week; but, at this point, I have to assume you ghosted me.
Barring the unlikely event that some five-day emergency had kept me from responding all week, he had spent the last five days becoming surer with each passing moment that I had simply decided to "walk away" and declined to offer him the courtesy of a heads up.
Furthermore, his decision to close his message with "Be well" (instead of something charming like he ordinarily did) assured me in no uncertain terms that he was walking away too.
I was crushed. I genuinely had no idea that five entire days had passed. And, this man seemed to genuinely have no idea that he'd had me in his hand for weeks now! The only silver lining to the whole thing was that he might be just as crushed as I was—judging at least by his decision to bother writing me one last message instead of just moving on. All I could do was tell him the truth and hope that he believed me.
So I did.
I texted him to apologize... and to show him that I had put Signal on my phone, just for him! We fell back into conversation like nothing had happened, and I started messaging him as often as I felt I could without seeming clingy.
He never left my mind.
And, when he finally called me—on December 9th at 8:38pm—my life would never be the same.
The Call
Kevin says...
Three full weeks and a day out from my initial email, Athennia and I finally conversed over the phone for the first time. And, it's hard to think of a subject we didn't manage to talk about that night...
We discussed life and liberty, politics and philosophy, romance and sexuality, music, literature, culture, cuisine, the pandemic and the beforetimes, psychology, spirituality, science, economics, and everything in between.
For all the esoteric things I find fascinating—topics that "ordinary people" seem unwilling to expend the effort to care about, and on which self-described intellectuals too often seem incapable of meaningfully opining—there was nothing I could say to which Athennia didn't offer a sagacious and well-reasoned reply.
Moreover, I can't readily recall a single instance in which her comments took the form of a rebuttal: It was more like this wonderful stream of concurrence and elaboration—like, permutation after permutation of...
Yes! I feel the same way. Also, here's my unique perspective...
Athennia would later tell me I pretty much had her at my hello email. But, for me, it was this phone call.
As I confided in my calendar afterward...
Talked on the phone with Athennia for nearly three hours: She is brilliant and nerdy and awesome.
We both knew in the first couple minutes that this conversation wouldn't be our last—nor would it even prove to be our longest, since we surpassed the three-hour mark several times over the subsequent evenings leading up to our first date a week later.
Our First Date
Athennia says...
We made plans for me to come over after work on Thursday, December 16th so that we could finally meet in person... exactly a month after the evening Kevin had first found my profile and decided he wanted to write to me.
He spoofed the whole "I hope my blind date isn't secretly an axe-murderer" trope when he gave me his address just before we hung up with each other to go to bed the night before—letting me know that he'd be vulnerable and slept with his bedroom window open a crack.
We got a lot of mileage continuing that the next morning and afternoon, right up to the point that I clocked out and texted him to make sure he was still expecting me.
He responded,
Yep. Sharpened all my hatchets an hour ago. We can duel in the backyard.
...And, when I told him that my GPS was estimating 23 minutes until I met my victim, he shot back with,
Good. Then I do still have time to dig the moat.
I remember getting out of my car and seeing Kevin for the first time. I was so nervous! I felt like I knew him so well after so many lengthy emails and phone calls, but at the same time, I realized in that moment that I was still meeting a perfect stranger.
His eyes were the first thing I noticed... a beautiful shade of blue, but with with zig-zags of white that looked like lightning bolts in the middle of his irises. I assumed they had to be contacts but was pleasantly surprised to find out some time later that they were in fact his real eyes.
I also noticed that he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt... Kind of odd, heading into winter. But, he worked from home and could wear what he wanted, and I already knew he wasn't one for rules and conformity. So I didn't think much of it...
But then, he did something I wasn't prepared for at all: He asked if I felt like going for a walk!
Naturally, my gut response was,
In the middle of December?! No...! Too cold...!
But somewhere between my brain and my lips, that got translated into
Sure! I'd love to.
For the next shock, he proceeded to "get ready" for the walk by grabbing his keys and dropping them in his pocket. No jacket. No hat. No sweatshirt. I was standing there wishing I'd brought a second coat, and he just shrugged and asked, "Ready?"
Yes. No. I don't know. Sure.
We walked around his neighborhood making light conversation as the sun started to set. Eventually he could tell how cold I was getting, and he announced that we were almost at "the halfway point."
What?!
But he confessed that we had started circling back awhile ago, and assured me we would be back home momentarily.
Then, he asked me out to dinner. We went to a nearby Mexican restaurant called Las Margaritas (which was phenomenal) and we just kept talking the entire time. Before dinner. During dinner. After dinner. It was just like our phone calls, except that I hadn't been a nervous wreck over the phone!
When we returned home, he put on some music and directed me to the sofa, then surprised me by sitting at the opposite end from mine. I was simultaneously shocked and pleased that he seemed to have no intention of trying to "make a move," and we literally talked the rest of the night away until he kicked me out around 10:00 because he knew I had to be up for work at 4:30 the next morning.
I was surprised yet again when he walked me out to my car but clarified that he had no intention of trying to kiss me! Even when I confessed that I wouldn't say no to a kiss, he just laughed and insisted that it wasn't his style. And, while it was more than mildly frustrating not knowing why he wasn't trying to kiss me, I found it refreshing not to have to feel pressured or obligated to do anything beyond say goodnight.
He asked me to let him when I got home safely, and I did... also letting him know how very much I had enjoyed the evening.
Second, Third, and nth Dates
Kevin says...
Our first date only reinforced what we'd already discovered during our (by then) hours and hours on the phone together: that the Venn diagram of our respective worldviews was delightfully circular. We jibed on every level that mattered—from our ethics, politics, and romantic styles all the way down to our musical tastes, preferred cuisines, and senses of humor.
So, what was there to do but ask when I could see her again?
The next day was a Friday—when my family and I would traditionally get together and order takeout for dinner. Was it tacky to invite Athennia to join us?
I didn't care! I asked if she was game, and she accepted: She met my mom and stepdad (Catherine and Ron), and my sister and her husband and their one-year-old daughter (Kelly, Steve, and Olivia). Then she and I visited late into the night—talking, listening to music, and watching a lovely little romantic film called John Wick (mostly for background noise: we had each seen it before).
We took Saturday off (she had kids at home, after all) but spent all day together on Sunday. Somewhere between hanging out again, cooking dinner together, and her finally saying goodbye to head home at 2:00 A.M. (in the hopes of waking up at 5:00 A.M. for work—which, needless to say, did not happen!), we realized we were half a week into a relationship.
We continued seeing each other as often as possible in the weeks that followed. I briefly met her mom (Lou) a few days after Christmas. And, just before New Year's, I met the kids over dinner at Applebee's! Taylor and her girlfriend (Ahlina) had a blast acting goofy the entire time; and, as for Riley, she hid behind her hair and a Fauci face-diaper, and only said four words all evening long—
Ewwwww; what IS this?!
—uttered with maximum disgust in response to the cardinal sin of her chicken fingers arriving with a ramekin of barbecue sauce instead of the ketchup she'd requested.
When I confessed to Athennia that I couldn't tell whether the kids liked me, she assured me that they wouldn't be acting so rambunctiously if they didn't... So, I knew I was in when Taylor commandeered the car's stereo to stream her favorite Doja Cat-flavored obscenities on the drive home in an attempt to get a rise out of us.
Challenge accepted, Taylor: Your mom and I grew up listening to far worse vulgarity than Doja Cat ;)
Inseparable
Athennia says...
Admittedly, we moved quite quickly. But given that we were in our ~40s instead of in our ~20s, we dispensed with the games and the drama and got right to the point on things that actually matter: what we want out of life, what we're looking for in a partner, what our plans were for the future, and so on.
Christmas was nearly upon us, but having just met him, I was ill-prepared to find anything I thought would be worth giving him. And, I certainly wasn't expecting anything myself! But I had no idea that he had been paying close attention to all our conversations and piecing little things together here and there.
He told me that his sister does a small Christmas brunch every year, and invited me to come. I had fun watching the family exchange gifts and was totally floored when Kevin brought one out for me... then equally surprised to find that it was a gift basket of thoughtfully-chosen things I'd actually use (a first in any of my romantic relationships).
He went for a "body, mind, and spirit" theme, complete with a bottle of lilac-scented (my favorite) body wash, the first three installments of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy literary series, and an adorable little stuffed groundhog that he said was to keep me company in times when we couldn't be together.
The kids were ecstatic when I got home that night and showed them the basket (and the card and the one-page letter he had written me). Taylor said,
Mom, he nailed it! He really listens! He gets it!
Then Kevin got to meet my family just before New Year's. And on January 7th, he gave me a beautiful necklace with a secret message encoded in it just for us. I love it so much that I hope I never have to take it off!
We hung out with the kids again the following week, ordering take-out at Kevin's house and playing Cards against Humanity all night. We all had a blast. Kevin found out that Riley wanted to learn to hack and write code, and Taylor and Ahlina were into graphic design. So he surprised the kids with some old computers he had laying around in storage, installing Linux Mint on them and personalizing each one with various applications he thought the kids might find conducive to their goals.
She's the One
Kevin says...
Athennia and I continued to spend every moment we possibly could together throughout January and February. We crossed off all the usual boxes of new-relationship bingo—dining out far too often, going for walks in the park, playing rummy to an extent that may or may not qualify as full-blown pathological, and even dusting off a copy of Parcheesi once... which Athennia has not asked me to play again, since I shamelessly blockaded all her pieces and mopped the floor with her hopes and dreams for the entire game. <shrug>
But, more importantly, we did just as much "real-life" stuff...
I shared some of my writing with her, which she promptly devoured and asked for more. And, she was just as into watching documentaries, keynotes on various subjects, and podcasts published by various mentors of mine in everything from gardening and homesteading, to music theory, to politics and philosophy. She also didn't bat an eye at the idea of getting her hands dirty when I half-jokingly asked if she wanted to help me feed my composting worms—which, it turned out, she absolutely did :)
As we neared the end of February, she was right there to help me start the seedlings for our spring garden: sifting the finished compost to use as fertilizer; mixing the potting soil and funneling it into seed trays; and planting broccoli, cucumber, eggplant, scallions, spinach, tomatoes, and four varieties of sweet and hot peppers.
The proverbial "honeymoon stage" came and went without either of us noticing in the slightest; and, the moment I awoke on the morning of Thursday, 24 February, my first thought was the conscious realization that I wanted Athennia to be my wife.
So, I blew off whatever else I'd had planned and spent the entire day shopping for a ring... and then spent the better part of a month thinking of when, where, and how I wanted to pop the question.
À proposal
Athennia says...
...And of course I said yes! But you can read about that here.