Because some have asked for this, this is the not particularly incredible and mostly true story of how the Texas Tiger and Khereva met.
If that interests you, then come below the fold with me. If not, hey, there are plenty of meaty election diaries all around us!
Back in the early nineties, an acquaintance of mine ran a comic & game store, and many friends of the owner used to get together on Friday nights to go out to dinner together. I had recently started teaching at a small private school and
I never thought these letters were real one of the teachers there was in that dinner group. She invited my first wife and me to come join them some Friday, figuring that we were suitable for inclusion in this group.
Well, we showed up one Friday soon after that and my fellow teacher met me at the shop door, and showed me round the group, then pointed toward a woman sitting in the back. She said, "That's [ Tiger ]. Whatever you do, don't talk to her. If she wants to talk to you, she'll talk to you. Okay, now over here is... " and so it went.
That's the short form, because that is technically how we met.
Over the next few years, I proceeded to fly that first marriage into the ground. At the same time, Tiger had often ridden with us to a friend's house for a group Babylon 5 watching party each week. I got custody of giving Tiger a ride, so we would drive up to watch the show, and I'd often give her a ride to the dinner on Friday's. We had fairly compatible tastes in movies and television, and enjoyed chatting on the drive.
As the Babylon 5 watching party fell prey to the fifth season rescheduling, the two of us were the only ones watching, and the party was moved to my little apartment. We'd watch TV, have dinner, and drive her home. Just pals, basically (yes, the amount of distance and rejection in that phrase was there, to my shame).
Meanwhile, I was trying to start dating again, with little success, and with the sort of self-sabotage you might expect from someone who already had a good partner coming over to his apartment to have dinner and enjoy entertainment that we both enjoyed, but who still felt somehow that he couldn't meet the right woman.
After a fair amount of work on getting my emotions back online and adjusting (and owning up to responsibility for) to the end of my marriage, I was sitting at home and grousing to myself about how nobody loved me, and I was thinking, you know, as a human being, I'm made in the image of God. And that image ought to be lovable, by definition, right? And a little voice said, So doesn't that mean that the Tiger deserves to be loved, too? For a little fraction of a second, I pondered that one, but not for much longer than that. I decided that yes, if the first part of my complaint was valid at all, then the suggestion was definitely true.
And then everything became very different.
So, I started thinking in those terms. Over the next few days, I tried it on, thinking of her that way, feeling and acting loving. And wow, what an improvement I felt in my life. I started to bring this up to the Tiger in email, and I think she was as nervous about it as I was, both of us pretty interested, and both of us worried about being rejected by the other. After a few more days we met to talk things over and decided to give a relationship a try. "Baby steps," as her boss characterized our process of dating without dating for a year or so.
But the big plus of those baby steps was that there wasn't really any period of "acting perfect" or "infatuation," or whatever you want to call those bliss-filled first moments. We'd already known each other for five years prior to that, and seen each other at our best and worst. She's already seen my apartment the way I really kept it. I'd already seen how she really liked to dress, or eat, or what movies she loved or hated. She'd seen my computer and the button on my desk that said, "A good blowjob sure would cheer me up right about now," and I'd seen her cats, and Dr. Who paperbacks, and knew about her days training horses, and the like. So we walked in with our eyes open and without feeling either of us needed or wanted to "change" the other.
That was about eight years ago. There's a lot more but it can wait. And y'all asked.