How We Met {Post Written By Popular Request}

So, in my last post I said that if you wanted to know more about Mason, ask in the comments and I'd write a new post. Carmen just said she wanted to know "more", and Chloe said she wanted to know how we met. Therefore, this post is brought to you in part by younger siblings.

Mason and I met the very first day we were at BYU. Our parents had left just that morning, and NSO was the next day. That night, there was a party for Wyview, which included a bunch of activities followed by a dance. I only know one person from back home (Connor J) in Wyview, and he wasn't arriving until late that night, so I went to the activity trailing along behind Alexandra (who I had met just that afternoon) and her friends.

Early on in the dance, I got asked to dance by some random guy, and when the song was over, I couldn't find Alex or any of her friends. This created a short moment of insecurity, but then I realized that hardly anybody knew anybody well here yet, and that we were all here to make friends, so I started just randomly joining groups, dancing for a bit, and then fading out and joining another one. It was pretty fun. At one point, I had basically exhausted all of the large groups in my vicinity, and was dancing alone for a moment. A group of three guys invited me to dance with them.

I've got to admit, at first glance I wasn't particularly interested in spending the dance with these guys, but there was no polite way to say no, or even a good reason to, so I joined their group. We started talking pretty quickly, and by the time the dance began winding down, we were all sitting out on the lawn chatting. (It was an outdoor dance. August nights in Utah have awesome weather.) The dance ended at 11:00, but we all stayed out talking until 1:30 in the morning. By the time we left, my conclusion was that I had a good time with these guys, and while I would have been glad to find out that any of them were in my ward or my classes, I didn't particularly expect to see them again, and I wasn't too bummed out about it. After all, you never keep in touch with people you meet at dances. I chalked our ability to talk up to the fact that we had just moved out on our own and everyone was desperate to make friends or form a human connection, nothing more.

When I got home, my roommates said, "Oh there you are, we thought you were dead." Awesome. For the first week or two, I think they thought that I was a huge flirt and party girl - after all, I had stayed out until 1:30 am with three guys I hadn't met before, but was okay with never seeing them again. I wasn't even 100% sure of their names.

About two weeks into the semester, I had basically forgotten about these guys from the dance. I had met a really attractive guy in my philosophy class, was fending off a creepy guy from my FHE group, and was receiving anonymous notes to our apartment from some guy with a liking for stick figures and cartoon polar bears threatening penguins. (Combining species from separate hemispheres: deal breaker). But, one evening at ward prayer, a girl announced that she and her roommates had were having a dessert party at their apartment immediately following the meeting, and everyone was invited.

I didn't want to go. I had spent all day making and eating various desserts, and I knew that I would just trail along behind Alex, listening to her talk to people and stuffing my face with yet more sugar. Alex pointed out that I could just, you know, not eat dessert, and that it would probably be good to socialize with people in the ward.

Shortly after ward prayer, therefore, I found myself stuffing my face with sugar and trailing awkwardly behind Alex. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the girls had invited everyone from north Wyview, not just our ward. Mason had returned to his apartment after his ward prayer, found it empty, and went to see if his roommates were at this party they'd been invited to. They were not, so Mason found himself at a party where he knew absolutely nobody.

Well, he knew one person.

After a couple minutes glancing at each other to verify that, yes, we did know this person, and yes, they recognized us, he was the one who moved past the "Sure, he/she knows me, but what if they don't want to talk to me?" barrier and started conversation. So we started talking. And talking. And talking. Alex found herself in the position of listening to me socialize, and she quickly got bored and left, which a tiny portion of my brain vaguely noticed. We kept talking. At one point, we realized that the only people left in the apartment lived there or were the best friends of people who lived there, so we walked to my stairwell. And we kept talking. After a while, we realized the conversation wasn't ending anytime soon, so we sat down. And we kept talking. At literally the first break in the conversation, it was 2:30 am on a Sunday night, so we decided to go to bed. He told me I had "really awesome, pretty green eyes" and gave me a hug. I took the - for me - "bold" step of getting his last name, so I could add him on Facebook. (Facebook is going to show up a lot in these stories. Deal with it).

At this point, you are all probably wondering, what on earth were you talking about? Everything. Seriously, everything from Coldplay to science to high school to...everything. And, in the course of talking about everything, I realized that this guy was really, really amazing. I believe my enraptured description to Brianna when I texted her the next morning was "You will not BELIEVE the guy I met last night. He's like everything on those lists we had to make in Young Women's, plus the stuff that you don't actually put on the list because it's not a priority and it would make the list impossibly unrealistic." (Sorry, that sounds gushy just typing it. Whatever. It's how I felt and what I said, so it's going on here.)

Unlike any of the other guys I'd met so far, this guy was different. I could tell that there was the potential for us to be really good together, and even if he wasn't interested in me, I knew we could also just be awesome friends. So I made a decision I've never made before in my life - I was going to go for it. But that's another story.

(Stay tuned. I decided I want to write this all down somewhere, so I'm going to write another post and set it to auto-update on like Sunday or something, if I can figure the auto-post feature out.)