We fall in love. We look deep into this new person’s eyes and tilt forward, wanting only to be in his or her arms. All of the details of our carefully planned life fly into the air, reorganizing themselves around a new center.
That’s the dramatic version. The one in which two people see each other across a crowded room and know, in that split second, that they’re meant to spend their lives together. But people also meet in high-school social-studies class, or complaining about the coffee at work. Sometimes it takes them years to recognize each other as more than friends. Sometimes fate has to step in, hurling them into each other’s paths again and again. And those false starts and near misses are the most reassuring of all.
No matter how sure-footed you are, love will find a way to trip you up.
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After Carole Faber’s divorce, her sister urged her to place a personal ad. She finally did, but told no one. Her sister read the morning paper and recognized her ad immediately. Mortified, Faber tried to retract it, but she was too late.
Ken Thouvenot saw the ad. A widower, he was raising three kids alone. Faber was raising two. Both Catholic, they lived within half a mile of each other and worked two blocks apart. They both had sons named Dan—who turned out to be on the same baseball team.
The minute Thouvenot saw Faber, he recognized her from the games. He’d often considered going up to talk to her, but by the time he gathered his nerve, she was usually leaving for her other son’s game. So the newspaper ad was right on schedule… They ended up marrying, and together raised their five kids, plus another child besides—one big, happy family.
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Rachelle L’Ecuyer, Maplewood’s director of community development, met Hal Joseph at Macalester College. He was looking for passengers to share the 10-hour ride back to St. Louis (and help pay for gas). When they reached St. Louis, he dropped her off at her parents’ house and “pretty much spent the rest of the year ignoring me,” she says. “He was a senior, and I was a freshman. But we ran into each other over the years, always at the Ladue Schnucks.”
Fast-forward 16 years. L’Ecuyer was working for a real-estate brokerage, and Joseph called her. “I was going through a divorce and got very excited when he called,” she says. “As it turns out, he was married and just interested in how I got into real estate.”
Fast-forward another eight years, to 2008. Joseph, who’d now been divorced four years—and was working as a divorce mediator—found L’Ecuyer’s email address and got in touch. They met for lunch and went to an art opening. This time, she assumed they were just friends—until he asked her out again. And again.
At a pottery class, L’Ecuyer made Joseph a ball-shaped rattle, painted like a billiard ball with the number 24, and inscribed it: “I forgive you for taking 24 years to ask me out.”
*
“Our story started with an insult,” says Kate Sinnwell Erker of Bissinger’s. “At a bar, no less.” She was celebrating her softball team’s near-win. Michael Erker was playing guitar, and by the second pitcher of beer, she thought his riffs and original lyrics were dreamy. “I would totally be his groupie,” she told her roommate in what she thought was a whisper. He heard her and stopped playing. “By that point, I had no shame, so I repeated it just as loudly,” she says. At the break, he came over to talk to her. “That was incredible,” she told him, batting her eyelashes. “You are so talented.” She leaned close and, touching his arm, confided, “They had this guy up here last week, and he was OK, but wow, you were just so much better!”
“That was me,” he said. “I was here last week.”
*
“My wife and I met at Nick’s Pub on Manchester,” says photographer Jeanna Redman Szuch. “We’d both arrived with separate groups. My group was playing darts and shuffleboard and ignoring me, and her group looked fun—they were standing in a circle playing a kind of truth-or-dare game. So I joined them and met Kate [Szuch].” They didn’t exchange numbers, but they remembered each other, and almost a year later, they met again while walking their dogs. It turned out they lived on the same street. They started dating, and on a bus trip to Washington, D.C., for the National Equality March, Kate proposed. They live near Nick’s Pub, and go there often to reminisce.
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Back in 1986, KETC Channel 9 vice president of production Patrick Murphy was working as an actor and model for Talent Plus. He got a gig for a series of national magazine ads for Canon copiers, and the photographer’s studio manager, Anne Barber, was advising him on his wardrobe. He was to play a guy named Stevie Porter: both Stevie’s goofy younger self and his current incarnation as a frustrated businessman with copier problems. He’d need, for starters, a fake beard and a longhaired hippie wig. “I mostly remember Annie having this sweet, patient voice as she tried to deal with a guy who thought the whole concept was pretty weird but really needed the money,” he says, laughing. They met on the first shoot, and he asked her to marry him on their third date. Says Murphy, “She’s been making sure I look presentable ever since.”
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Graphic designer Larry Torno’s friend Julie told him she thought he might like her fiancé’s ex-wife’s sister. Dazed, he agreed to show up at the Tony Bennett concert at Fox Theatre. Peg Bumb was playing bassoon in the orchestra, Julie explained. They could meet at intermission.
Alas, the concert went so smoothly, Mr. Bennett decided to forgo the break. Torno had brought binoculars so he could see what Bumb looked like, but the music stand hid everything but her eyes, “an intriguing, dark, dark brown.”
“I looked for her after the show, but wasn’t sure who I was searching for,” he says. Finally, he caught up with her by phone. When he rang her doorbell and she raised the blinds, he saw those brown eyes again. “We shared conversation and wine at Dressel’s,” he says, “and I knew I’d found someone I could talk to for the rest of my life.”
*
“He jumped in the back seat of my car,” begins Lauren Kolbe. “I was 16 years old, and my friend and I were in the drive-through at Hardee’s on a Saturday night, waiting on a Diet Coke. I had a convertible, the top was down, and suddenly, two guys jumped in the back of the car and said, ‘Take us for a ride!’”
Lauren turned around. “Excuse me?” Scott Kolbe blurted that they’d just left Six Flags, and they’d stolen one of the six flags right off the flagpole!
“OK, we’ll drive these guys around the parking lot and dump them off,” she told herself. “They’re petty thieves, after all, and we must get rid of them!”
Twenty years later, she’s sleeping with a thief. She’s even started a marketing company, KolbeCo, with him.
“I believe his ex-girlfriend from the time has the big flag,” she adds dryly.
*
Marketing expert Kathleen Carroll’s flight to Texas was delayed, so she glanced around, spotted an attractive guy, and wondered what he was reading. She walked past to make a phone call, and he came over to ask what the story was with their plane’s delay. “Southwest Airlines called 1 through 30, and he had, like, No. 3, and I had 60. I said, ‘They are calling your number!’ And he just kept ignoring them.” They ended up sitting together, talking for the entire flight, exchanging numbers.
A week after she flew home, the phone rang. She thought it was a guy who’d been annoying her. “And I’d just poured milk in my Raisin Bran and I thought, ‘Aw, it’s going to get soggy!’” she recalls. Finally, she realized her caller was Mike Parvis, the engineer from the airport. He was calling on his birthday; he’d gone out to dinner with his parents, and couldn’t wait to get back home to call her. They managed a long-distance relationship for several months, and when they set the date for their wedding, they invited the president of Southwest Airlines, on a lark. They didn’t think about it again until about three months after the wedding, when a heavy package arrived: a 3-foot-tall crystal vase from Southwest Airlines.
*
SSM–St. Louis executive vice president John Eiler read this ad in the Eugene Weekly 15 years ago: “SWF, 33, seeks summer companion(s)—could be more, could be longer—for the ‘usual Eugene’—coffee, movies, microbrew, music, intelligent conversation, outdoor stuff. Relaxed and casual, keep it simple.” This was back in the time when singles ads were gateways to an elaborate voice-mail system, and Eiler and Catherine Harman spent hours on the phone. “We discovered that we both had research interests in frontal-lobe development—hers in infancy and mine in late life,” he says. “By connecting, we probably spared two other innocent people from a life of absolute boredom.”
*
SLM account exec Dani Toney wrote an ad, too, back when she worked for the Riverfront Times. It read: “STARRS 8/8: I saw you at Starrs around 11 a.m. Friday. You were wearing a Grateful Dead shirt, tie-dye bandanna, and purchasing some wine and champagne, driving a red Porsche. I was wearing a satin sunflower shirt, and saw you as I was pulling out of the parking lot as you were leaving the store. I am interested in seeing you again and meeting you. Give me a ring.” He did.
*
St. Louis Jewish Light editor Ellen Futterman met her husband, Jeff Burkett, seven years ago at a Neville Brothers concert at Mississippi Nights. Distraught because her boyfriend had moved to Connecticut, she barely noticed. Burkett asked her friend Harriet out—once, then never called back. “Meanwhile, Jeff and I kept running into each other at music shows,” says Futterman, who agonized when he called for a date. “I didn’t want Harriet to think I was betraying an unspoken credo among girlfriends not to date each other’s discards. But there was something about him I really liked.” As it turned out, Harriet couldn’t have cared less. And Burkett said he’d only talked to Harriet because Futterman seemed so uninterested.
*
Rob Kessler saw Karen Laursen at happy hours after work, but says, “The wedding ring kind of took away any thoughts of asking her out.” Once, they wound up partners in a game of pool. “We were by far the worst team, but somehow the opponents would keep scratching on the eight ball, so we kept winning,” he recalls. “We had a blast together that night. It was the usual story…all the good ones are taken.” A few years later, they wound up at the same Halloween party, and he asked Laursen why she never brought her husband to any of these gatherings. She told him she was in the process of getting a divorce. And there he was, dressed as the Big Bad Wolf. He waited as long as he could stand it before asking her out, and they had “the most awkward first date ever,” he says. It didn’t stop them.
*
Dawn Shelton also met Mark Miller at a friend’s Halloween party: “He was the ghost of Charlie Brown, and I was corn on the cob,” she recalls. The costumes took everything out of context, and when they started talking, all she heard was “Mark.” So she had no idea he was the “cool guy named Miller” a friend had told her, months earlier, would be perfect for her.
Luckily, it was obvious.
Web Exclusive: Extra stories from St. Louis couples
Foreshadowed
Nikki Eckert’s big brother married her to Don Stock when she was 7 years old, in their backyard. Eleven years later, Don came over, went out to her backyard, got down on one knee, and proposed for real.
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Misha Benavides met Lee Pelligreen “only because a friend dragged me to a party. There he was, and for some reason, we both began speaking in Spanish, which he had learned living in Spain and I had learned living in Peru.” He’d been to Antarctica, so instead of making excuses about seeing her etchings, he came over genuinely interested in seeing her penguin collection. She soon forgot their 10-year age difference and agreed to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, where he proposed.
*
“Ask her to dance!” Rob Cole’s friends kept urging him. He was the hospital personnel director, and he’d just handed a five-year pin to a tall, pretty nurse named Susan Schneider. They were both single, surrounded by well-meaning married friends. Cole squashed his dread of the dance floor and approached. “I knew the minute we danced that I would be marrying him,” Susan recalls—and six months later, she did.
Stage-Struck
Falling in love’s easy when the guy’s a magician. Dennis Hampel was performing at Six Flags, and Clydea West was working in concessions at the Colonnade. Every night, he bought a corn dog from her. And after they started dating, she became part of his magic show—literally as well as metaphorically.
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Circuses have their charm, too: Karen Gomez and Jeff Guilds were both working as temps for Cirque du Soleil when it came to St. Louis. They met at the cast and crew party for “Dralion” and The Lion King.
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Mallarie Zimmer met Heath Aldrich four summers ago, when they both ran away to Charleston, S.C., with Circus Flora. “It wasn’t love at first sight,” Zimmer says, but they enjoyed each other’s company more every day. Aldrich proposed with a plastic toy ring he found in the sand while cleaning up after an evening performance. When the summer ended, they left their respective jobs as wardrobe assistant and ring/tent crewman—but they didn’t want to live without each other. They went to Oregon and packed all the possessions that would fit in Aldrich’s Chevy Blazer, then moved together to St. Louis.
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Holly Lane met Cedric Mixon when they were both auditioning for a fashion show. They ended up getting a scene together, walking the runway. Four years later, they were walking down the aisle.
Challenging Beginnings
Cristina Quiroz and Kenny Vigil were both stationed at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Ariz., and they were chosen to volunteer for a week at the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic in Snowmass, Colo. During the day, they worked hard; in the evenings, they went to bars and dinners with the disabled veterans and other volunteers. By the end of the week, Quiroz and Vigil were finding excuses to have dinner alone, and when they got back to their base, they started dating. Now married, they figure they have a good story for their kids and grandkids.
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Jason Stone met Kelli Stanovsky at a “pink-slip party.” “She lost her job; I gained a wife,” he says. “In the end, it all works out.”
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Jodi Ritchie and Mike Burton both taught at the same high school, but they didn’t start dating until they spent three hours sitting in lawn chairs on picket-line duty during the 1978 teachers’ strike. “The next thing I knew, we were dating, then engaged, then married!” she says. “We wanted a contract, and we sure got one.”
Other People’s Dates
Robin Ragsdale wasn’t wild about being the third wheel on an autumn trip to the wineries, so her roommate’s boyfriend asked a friend to keep her company. The roommate’s relationship broke up soon after, but Robin and Bob dated for the next 12 years and have been married almost 20.
Worlds Converging
Tiffany Bentley grew up in a city row house in St. Louis. Trae Halkitis grew up on the Nassau beach in the Bahamas. She was packed and ready to go to Loyola University Chicago when she got a scholarship to Saint Louis University; he had a scholarship to the University of Missouri–Columbia, but wanted a taste of city life. They both wound up at SLU, both majoring in marketing, both active in Greek life, with the same circle of friends. They started dating secretly, in case it didn’t work out, and married five years later, still amazed that their paths converged at all. And Tiffany wound up working as a wedding planner.
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“He sat on me at a party, still in his softball uniform, soaked in sweat from playing all day,” Susan Harbaugh recalls of meeting her husband, Will, laughing with the ease of the long-married. “Oh, and he hated redheads...but it was too dark to tell. And he thought I was older, and I thought he was younger, so that made us the same age!”
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Katie Horridge almost didn’t go to her friend’s housewarming party. Both of her parents were ill; exhausted after work, she’d gone over to their house to check on them. On impulse, she decided she’d go after all, “wearing nothing more exciting than striped bermudas and one of my dad’s old band T-shirts (Soulard Blues Band).” At the party, she met Adam Lange, and they hit it off—she thought—and spent the entire night talking, laughing, and dancing. “At the end of the night, he walked me to my car, said good night, and turned and walked away!” She was hurt, and he was kicking himself for not asking her out; it took plotting on their friends’ part to get them together again. Even that didn’t work—after a couple of failed attempts, Lange finally threw a party himself, as an excuse to see Katie again. “That time, he made sure to get my phone number,” she says.
Getting Lucky
Lisa Hall met Miguel Albaladejo at Harrah’s casino. “He was actually the manager at The Range Steakhouse there,” she says, “and he annoyed me because I was quite independent, and he was chivalrous and pulled out my chair.” She saw him there on and off for several years, then he disappeared. Her mother called one day and said, “I found Miguel! He’s running the Star Club at Ameristar.” They went there for dinner, and Albaladejo pulled out Hall’s chair and knelt next to her to show her pictures of his trip with his kids to Puerto Rico. Her mother teased that he should get up, that he was making her nervous. “She’s just afraid you might propose,” teased Hall—and four months later, he did.
