Over a period of about six months, My and I went from work colleagues, to work colleagues that flirted, to work colleagues that dated. Here are some of the things I remember from each of these phases:
1) Just work colleagues: My first impression of My was similar to most people’s.
- Is she actually this nice? I questioned why someone at work so incredibly bubbly while working on pretty boring stuff, and why someone was so overly helpful to a colleague they just met. Whatever it was, it didn’t take long for me to melt into My’s warmth and embrace a relationship with someone who seemed to genuinely care about the things I had to say.
2) Flirting work colleagues: It didn’t take too long to realize that My was actually that nice; and not just to me. To everyone. If you have ever met her, it is fair for me to assume that she made you feel like you were the most important person in the room. So despite the good old saying "don’t dip your pen in the company ink’" I allowed myself to drift into the stage of Slacking at all hours of the day and setting up ‘meetings that could have been an email’. During this stage, here were a few of the things I remember thinking to myself the most:
- Why can’t it be this easy and enjoyable to talk to everyone?
- Is it normal to Slack my HR Benefits stakeholders at 9pm on a Wednesday? (I knew the answer to this one)
- Maybe this time it is ok to dip my pen in the company ink
3) We didn’t really phase into the amount of time we spent together once we started dating. My would watch NFL Redzone with me every Sunday while ordering 3 large pizza pies, and walked with me while I played 18 holes of triple bogey golf after work. She introduced me to Vietnamese food, as well as other unique foods in SF that I never was exposed to when I lived under a rock pre-My. We had so much fun together, mainly because My could truly find the joy in any activity, food, or lazy Sunday. During this phase, it was mainly a lot of pinching myself and asking myself the following:
- How is she not turned off by how awful I am at golf and the temper tantrums I throw on the course?
- After which slice of pizza this Sunday will My finally start judging me? The fifth or the sixth?
- How has this person tried literally every restaurant in SF, been to every cool city in the world, and be friends with everyone she meets?
- I think I made the right decision by dipping my pen in the company ink.
We hung out pretty much every day once we starting dating, which ultimately made COVID an excuse to continue doing what we were doing. Fast forward four years and we both get major separation anxiety when one of us needs to go away for a few days (literally, neither of us can sleep when we are apart). So for this reason, when people ask if we will sleep apart the night before our wedding, the answer is no, because we’d like to actually sleep that night.
The first thing I thought about Jon when I first met him (I still remember the outfit he was wearing in the meeting), was that he was really mature for his age! “He must be 30 or something,” I immediately thought. Turns out he was only 25 at the time, and is younger than me – this is something he’s very prideful about.
At work, Jon meant business. I remember being so afraid of him and his deep, serious voice, especially when he was negotiating with my external vendors on contract terms and pricing. Meanwhile, this would be the same guy asking me to “show him around his new neighborhood” in San Francisco, and “help him sell his furniture as part of the move.” He’d ask me to do casual meetings in the cafeteria over coffee, or if I was staying late for the 7pm dinners at Lyft, “to go over a question on a contract.” Soon enough, I started wondering if this was a typical co-working relationship? The volume of Slack messages and texts were starting to build up, and I was sure that no person would care this much about vendors’ contract terms…right?
So, the coffee meet-ups and after-work dinners turned into weekend hang-outs, 1000 orders of takeout from Doordash during COVID, football Sundays, 2 apartments becoming 1, My turning into a Knicks/Jets/Mets fan, and sending our belongings from San Francisco, to New York City.