meester and I met in August of 1998 at freshman orientation. I started a conversation with him because of a dare between me and several other people, but long after the dare was over (to pick him up), I kept talking. We spent the whole evening on his campus talking and flirting, walking from one end of campus to the other, sometimes with company, sometimes without. The evening was relatively chaste, as both of us had significant others, but we were both enthralled. We met again, two nights later, for another orientation event. This time, we forgot about significant others and flirted non-stop. We danced, held hands, and he helped me find my dorm at the end of the night when I got turned around. That same evening, he told me he was falling in love. I didn't believe him then, but by the end of that weekend, after innumerable kisses, and hours upon hours of talking, I maybekindasorta believed it.

We both broke up with our high school sweethearts and began our relationship in earnest. There's no sense in walking you through the whole 8 years of it, but some of the key moments were:

• breaking up 2nd semester of our first year, because I was too scared to be in a real, serious, relationship
• living together the summer after our second year in campus apartments
• promising to live together after we graduated our fourth year, culminating in the decision to stay in Philly
• moving to the Boston area together so that I could start graduate school in our sixth year
• deciding we were ready to think about getting married in our seventh year.

We now live in the Boston area with our two cats and 4+ computers, happily existing in stasis, which I am about to shake up... the only problem is choosing our new LastName! Yikes!