My Own Personal Love Story: Before the Blind Date
My husband and I met on a blind date in Boston in September 2003, during my last semester of grad school.
A few months earlier, an older friend of mine had asked if she could give my number to her boss—a research scientist at MIT. Although I was open to meeting new people, as a creative writer, I was about as far from a research scientist as could be, and I asked my friend whether or not this guy and I would have anything in common. She winked at me and said, “You’re about the same age.”
You might think this would have put me off, but it didn’t. Growing up, I’d gone to an all-girls school, so I’d never really learned how to flirt. Plus, I was shy. If it weren’t for set ups and online dating, I’m not sure I’d ever have gone on any dates at all.
I told my friend to go ahead and give this guy—her boss—my number.
A couple of months went by. No word from my friend’s boss. When I asked her if he was actually planning on calling me, she said she wasn’t sure.
A week or two later, I finally got a message from this guy—Paul. The message was nothing too impressive; all I knew was that he had a deep voice and sounded pretty serious.
When I called him back, I was at the mall and Paul was at the airport on his way to Seattle, so neither of us could hear very well, and our conversation was fairly brief. When he asked if I was interested in getting together, I told him I was about to head down to Cape Cod for a two-week vacation with my family, but that he was welcome to call me in early September to set something up.
Given that it had taken him so long to call me in the first place, I wasn’t sure I was going to hear from him again, but I can’t say that I was unduly worried about it. In fact, while I was on the Cape, my mom and I had a conversation about this potential suitor who seemed “really serious.”
My mother, wise woman that she is, replied, “Well, you never know.”
(I think she was just happy that I’d moved on from my long-term college boyfriend, who had never treated me particularly well. I hadn’t dated for a year after breaking up with him, and she was glad that I was finally meeting new people and keeping an open mind about the future.)
It was probably a week or so after I got back to Boston that Paul called again. Again, our conversation was nothing spectacular. What I remember most about that particular phone call was discussing what kind of movies we liked. Although it didn’t seem as though we had much chemistry, we agreed to meet up for dinner the following Friday.
After we made our plans, it came to light that Paul didn’t have a car, so we decided that I’d drive to his apartment, and we’d then take the “T” (what Bostonians call the subway) together to dinner at a seafood restaurant in Faneuil Hall.
On the Wednesday before our scheduled date, I got a call from my modeling agency. I’d randomly been approached by a talent scout while I was shopping at the Prudential Center Mall the previous spring, and I’d gotten a few small modeling jobs as a result:
Posing as a mom in an ad for a baby toy company;
Posing as a bride for some art school students; and
Modeling a ball gown that was being auctioned for charity at a fundraiser gala.
It was flattering and fun, and it paid really well.
It turned out that the designer whose dress I’d worn at the fundraiser gala wanted to book me for a photo shoot that Friday. Although the shoot was scheduled to start at 2:00 pm, it was unclear exactly how long it would take.
I knew I needed to call Paul and reschedule, but I was nervous about calling him out of the blue. (I had some friends who’d read The Rules, and they kept insisting that the man should always be the one to pick up the phone first.)
I also wasn’t sure whether or not to let Paul know that I had a photo shoot, as it wasn’t like I was a “real” model; I was doing it for fun and some extra money while I was in grad school, but being a model had never been a long-term career goal of mine.
And wouldn’t it seem conceited to bring up the modeling thing before I’d even met the guy? What if I told him I was a model, but he didn’t find me attractive? I didn’t want to tee up a situation where the first thing I saw when I met him was a look of disappointment on his face.
The flip side, however, was that if I was vague about why I needed to reschedule, he might think I was trying to find a polite way to blow him off.
My sister, a much more confident and direct woman than I tend to be, told me in no uncertain terms that I was being ridiculous. “Meghann,” she said, “tell him that you’re a model, that you have a modeling shoot, and ask when you can reschedule.” Buoyed by her advice, that’s what I did.
It was quick call, and I was still nervous, but I was upfront about why I needed to reschedule and suggested that we get together on Saturday night instead. Paul mentioned that his mother was in town and that they were supposed to go to a Red Sox game on Saturday, but that he would rearrange his plans.
Friday, the day of the photo shoot, rolled around. I arrived at the designer’s house at 2:00 pm for hair and make-up before changing into the first of four gorgeous silk ball gowns I’d be modeling that day. It was after 9:00 pm by the time we finished everything up.
If I hadn’t rescheduled with Paul, I would have missed our date.
Keyed up from the photo shoot, I didn’t sleep well, and I worried that I’d show up for the date unable to mask my exhaustion. But then I remembered my last debacle of a blind date, and I relaxed, deciding that it probably wouldn’t matter much one way or the other what I looked like. It was highly unlikely that the evening would lead to any real romance.
My last blind date had started out well. The guy, a junior stockbroker, had seemed nice enough at first. Our conversation, however, had been stilted, and then things had gotten weird. As the waitress was clearing away my plate, he reached over, stabbed my leftover piece of salmon, and, without asking me, plopped it on his plate and proceeded to finish it off as though it was the most normal thing in the world.
All of which is to say, even though Paul had been willing to sacrifice a Red Sox game with his mother to go out with me, my expectations for our date were not particularly high.
Still, I put on a nice pair of black pants and my favorite pink sweater, then drove to Cambridge from my apartment in Dorchester, grumbling when the traffic in the tunnel on I-93 got bad. I found the street near Central Square where Paul lived and managed to parallel park my car, never an easy feat on the packed, narrow streets of Cambridge.
Unlike me, Paul didn’t live in an apartment complex, but in the basement unit of a house. Although I’d been in Boston two years by then, I still wasn’t used to seeing homes that didn’t have front yards. Regardless, I went down the steps and rang the bell. About two seconds later, he opened the door, and I immediately felt myself standing straighter, all the worries about our lack of chemistry on the phone and my previous bad blind dates flying out of my head.
Paul was tall, handsome, and clean cut, with brown hair and a broad, slightly crooked nose. His green, button-down shirt brought out the color of his kind, green-blue eyes. Over and above anything about his appearance, however, there was a sense of calm and good intentions about him that’s rare to find in anyone, let alone a twenty-three-year-old man.
He smiled and held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Paul.”
“Meghann,” I replied, shaking his hand while simultaneously trying to keep the butterflies swirling around inside me at bay. “Nice to meet you.”
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