Erin has asked me to write a little something here about the two of us and our life together.
To be honest, I can’t.
Not because I’m lazy, you understand. No, it’s because beyond a certain point, it’s really hard to explain everything that went in to the two of us getting married. And that’s what’s really the most interesting thing about all this. That’s why you’re reading this, isn’t it? To read the touching, warm, wonderful story about how we met, and fell in love and decided we wanted to be with each other for the rest of our lives. To find out what it was that made us decide to take this leap.
But I’ll be honest with you: I don’t particularly enjoy looking back on everything it took to get to this point. A lot of it was really tough. All worth it, of course. Every minute of it. We dug our feet in quite often, determined that all the hard stuff didn’t matter, ultimately, because we loved each other enough to figure it out, to make it work. To figure out how to spend the rest of our lives together.
As much as the prelude really tells the story, the exciting part of the story of the two of us – from my perspective, anyway – has been knowing that because of all of that work, we’re able to tackle each day as a couple. Doing so makes getting through this life that much more enriching and exciting for me.
I can’t explain that to you alone, because it wouldn’t have happened without both of us working on it together. So me telling that story by myself is impossible. It leaves out Erin’s side of things completely. Without Erin, there is no story, you see. There is no “us.” There is no “rest of my life.”
But Erin has stubbornly refused to work on this with me, so I’ll give it a shot.
Erin and I have been dating for a couple years now. We met while we were working together on a blog called Chicagoist. I was writing about music and movies, and Erin was writing about food. Since we were working online, we mostly corresponded via e-mail in the beginning, often in group threads discussing story ideas with the other writers. The first time I felt compelled to e-mail just her was when she did this post on pazckis and was getting a bruisin’ from commenters on the site. I e-mailed her to tell her that they oughta get stuffed. She agreed.
It’s impossible to overestimate how quickly we became friends after that. It honestly scared the crap out of me. Like that scene in The Matrix where Keanu suddenly realizes “I know kung-fu…” Having a conversation with Erin in person for the first time was like that. I felt like I instantly knew who she was, and what she was all about, and how much the two of us had in common.
The first time we met, I hugged her before I’d said as much as hello. First time we met: Hug. Now, we had talked over e-mail and IM several times prior to that. But still, it was a little cart-before-the-horse to be hugging someone I just met. Luckily, this didn’t seem to bother her that much. Later, she would tell me it felt natural. (Let’s face it, I’m a pretty good hugger.)
This meeting was during a brunch for Chicagoist writers at Wishbone on Lincoln Avenue. We were seated at a really long table of 15 people. We sat at the same end of the table, and I made a big effort to talk to a lot of people other than Erin so I wouldn’t seem like a total doofus. I was probably only moderately successful.
The next time we hung out together was during a Chicagoist reader Happy Hour at a now-closed bar called My Bar on Addison and Ashland. That night was fraught with problems. Some weird dude stole some of the prizes we were giving to readers. There was this reddish-colored cocktail that was getting everybody loaded. Erin slipped and fell on her butt. But all through that night, I just kept thinking “I really want to be friends with this person forever.”
We spent untold amounts of bandwith sending each other e-mails and IMs, talking about everything from music, to current events to just general bullshit. We also went to several concerts together, had several drinks together and helped each other through a lot. Does this make us different from other couples? No, probably not.
More than anything though, I think this is the thesis that has guided me and Erin through our entire relationship: “I just really want to be friends with this person forever.” I’m not sure either of us really knew what that was going to mean other than this: We knew we had to figure out a way to be a part of each other’s lives, because now that we knew this other person was out there, if we didn’t it would always feel like something was missing. Like Keanu going “Wait…I’m pretty sure I knew a martial art…I forget which one, but…woah.”
So I could tell you about a bunch of other stuff from our relationship like when we went to Memphis and saw Al Green and ate the best cheeseburger in the country. Or the time she met most of my college friends and I became convinced they liked her better than me. Or going to roller derby together. Or how every year on Valentine’s Day we go to White Castle. Or how going to a half-empty bar and shooting the shit with Erin is my favorite thing to do.
I could tell you all those things, but the story pretty much begins and ends with Erin and me.
We’re the rest of each other’s lives together. And that’s all that matters.
- Scott
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This is Scott. He is 33-years old and the Web Editor of Time Out Chicago magazine. Born in Lansing, Ill., he cites his years attending college in Ohio as his most formative, and his years since, living in Chicago, as his most enriching. In that time, he’s worked as a tech support rep and a supervisor at a runaway youth hotline. He’s also written for the local culture blog Chicagoist (where he engaged in a public feud with ’80s rocker Richard Marx, which was later immortalized in a YouTube video), freelanced for Metromix and Centerstage Chicago, and has been a commentator on Chicago Tonight, WGN Radio 720, and Filmspotting, a film review podcast. In his spare time, Scott enjoys comic books (especially Superman), whiskey, the oeuvre of Queen, Wii, The Faces, and the Atlantic Rhythm and Blues boxed set.
Oh, and Erin.
This is Erin. She is 32-years-old and the Director of Community Development for FohBoh.com, a B2B social networking site. Erin is a short, liberal Irish-Catholic from Joliet, Ill. who spent her college years in Peoria, Ill., before moving to Chicago. For good. Now that she has spent almost a decade living here, after a few cocktails she has a tendency to unleash a flood of “dis, dat, dem, dere, dos” onto the unsuspecting eardrum. Erin’s blog, Lose the Buddha, has appeared in O Magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Women’s Health, Women’s Day Weekly as well as Web sites such as MSBNC.com and Lifescript. She’s been on Good Morning America and WGN-AM radio, too. In 2005, her first, and at this rate last, book, Tales from the Scale, was published and lots of nice people bought it and said nice things about it. She has been blogging since God was a boy.
In her spare time, Erin enjoys running, cooking, scotch, and obsessing.
Oh, and Scott.
Erin and Scott live in the Roscoe Village neighborhood, where they are allowed to live because they own a dog. Her name is Glin, and she is a golden retriever. This is her. She likes chasing her ball, pig ears, licking your feet, eating grass and puking it up, and barking for no reason.
Glin is the one creature in Erin and Scott’s lives who is really ticked that she’s not attending the wedding.
