Meeting my future wife

Kate was in town from the United Kingdom, paying a visit to some old friends after a couple of weeks of travel. It was a Wednesday night in June; the night before, she’d caught the midnight flight out of Peru, where she’d been hiking and sightseeing on her own. She’d broken up with her boyfriend, and she’d been bitten by the travel bug again, so the time felt right for a little solo globetrotting.

My day, like most Wednesdays, was far less exciting than hers had been. I’d gone to work, and I’d done nothing with my evening. I hadn’t even wanted to go out to some hole in the wall in Kensington Market that night, but I’d heard a number of friends of mine would be there – including an old friend who I didn’t yet know was putting Kate up at her place while she was in town.

Kate had lived at a U of T co-op during the year she’d spent in Toronto several years prior, and she’d gotten to know a bunch of my friends while living there. I was going to school out of town at the time, so in spite of the odds, we didn’t actually meet during her first stay – though we wonder aloud, now and then, if we’ve just forgotten a moment when we bumped into each other in the hall during one of my visits.

She admitted to me years later that her early impression of me, based on things that mutual friends of ours had said – things they’d meant as complimentary – was that I was probably a real asshole, or at the very least, not her type. But that’s another story, and thankfully it didn’t end up being our story.

Our mutual friend introduced us, and we got to talking. And we kept talking, ignoring all the friends who sensed that something was in the air and were happy to leave us to our own devices. Soon enough, the bar was closed and we were getting kicked out.

Each of us left with the other on the mind, and over the next few days we made increasingly lame excuses to bump into each other. It thankfully didn’t take us long to grow up and admit that we felt like spending some time together.
Her visit became an extended stay, which in turn became an application for permanent residency.

She traveled back and forth over the next few years on various visas, between the apartment we shared here in town and various spots in the UK. Shortly after she got her residency, we bought a house, which grounded her here in spirit and mortgage payments alike.

In October, here in Toronto, we got married. I’ve never been a “love at first sight” kind of guy – and bear in mind, after all, that we can never be sure when we actually first met. But I do look back on that June night as the start of something big.

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