Ben And Sarah Through The Ages

Last week was our ninth anniversary. Miraculously I remembered, but neither of us felt like going out, so we hung out at home with Henry. Yes, we're super romantic, I know.

Our story:

Ben and I met in 1992. That year I was very grumpy because my parents decided to move halfway through the second semester of my junior year in high school. We moved an hour from the town I grew up in to the even more podunk town of Ramseur. Maggie and I were in the same chemistry class and instead of letting us be lab partners, the teacher made me sit next to a tall skinny strawberry blond kid named Ben Tilley. We were going over balancing equations, something I hadn't done yet at my old school, so I asked Ben how to do it. He said he didn't know how to explain it, and that was pretty much our last real conversation of the year. The next year my sister Beth took an interest in him and they started dating. Ben and I became friends after that and drew comics and joked around a lot in our physics class at the expense of the teacher, Howard Johnson. For some reason I told Ben about seminary and the hilariously bad church videos we got to watch. The next thing I knew he started going to seminary. He and Beth were pretty much set on getting married, and in May of 1994 Ben got baptized. The next year Beth and Ben broke up and I didn't hear from him in a while. We were still friends and started hanging out, but not dating or anything. Then right before he went on his mission he confided his amorous feelings for me, which I'd honestly been oblivious of. I wasn't quite prepared to hear what he had to say and had no idea what to say in turn. Ben took it as a rejection and left for his mission not knowing if he'd ever see me again. I felt pretty lame about the whole thing, so I wrote him a letter while he was in the MTC and explained myself. Then I went on my mission the next year and we wrote each other until I got home in October 1998. He proposed in February 1999, we got married in the Washington, D.C. temple August 7, 1999. After I survived three weeks of marriage in our one room studio and didn't kill Ben or myself, I realized I hadn't made a horrible mistake after all.

A few weeks ago we were watching some home improvement show on TV and these guys were moving a big glass door and one is explaining, "This door is three hundred pounds, it weighs a ton." Ben and I both opened our mouths and said pretty much the same sarcastic thing, "No, it weighs three hundred pounds."

Yes, we were made for each other.