Our Unique Courtship: My Wife and Me From Different Social and Economic Backgrounds

Our courtship was unique and a bit strange. For my part at least, it was really love at first bite! Probably the biggest surprise was that we got married at all! At the time we met, my wife and I were nearly total opposites. We held opposite beliefs on education, religion and the Vietnam War for example. We also came from totally different social and economic backgrounds.

At the time, I was attending an experimental college in Hawaii called New College. It was part of the University of Hawaii system. The college had one big old 2 story house and that was where the classes were held. The professors were mostly hippies and the academic stuff was sometimes complex and usually involved politics. The subject matter I was interested in, was also a bit obscure. One of my areas of self guided study for example was the Indonesian Wayang Kulit puppet sagas. Of course we had regular and more traditional classes too.

The day I met my wife for example, I was attending an English Class in one of the smallish rooms, and it was my turn to read a poem I had written about Vietnam. Suddenly I heard a rustle behind me and this slip of a girl rose up from behind the sofa I was sitting on gave me a withering look and than stomped out of the room! Her parting shot as she left the room was "That's a really bad poem!" I was momentarily stunned by this but none the less I completed my class reading. In the meantime I'm feeling a bit amused and a lot intrigued and so I tried to find out who the girl was.

The young lady turned out to be visiting 2 of the teachers who worked at the new college and were the care-takers of the building. Well for some reason I found her fascinating. A few days later the college held a dance which I attended and she was there for that too. I just sort of watched from afar because though she was very pretty, she also had a somewhat sharp tongue and I decided to find out more about her before we met formally.

One of my friends was the assistant dean of the school. I knew both he and his wife quite well and had been over to their house many times. At any rate one night they invited me over for dinner, and there was this same snippy girl! My friends didn't know about our run-in apparently. They had invited her too! Well for some reason that night our hosts had a huge fight! After a while it got so embarrassing we just decided to leave and I invited this girl out for a sandwich at the local hangout.

Of course we immediately began arguing about various subjects. However I noticed that whenever I made a point about this or that subject, a lot of thought went into the returning answer. Finally we began to find some areas of complete agreement too! After about 2 hours of this conversation, we found out we were in love! We proposed to each other! We didn't get married immediately but we began to spend enormous amounts of time together. We planned our wedding based on my cultural study of Indonesia, we sort of themed our wedding with Javanese batik overtones. It was quite an event as almost the entire school attended. How wonderful that was! We were both in our 30's and had been involved with other people and just recognized each other as soul mates. We recently celebrated our 35^th wedding anniversary so we did something right.