When I met Hayley for the first time, I was wearing short denim cut-offs and a leather tool belt.
We didn’t start dating until over a year later, but with an introduction like that it’s really no wonder she found me so charming and all-around irresistible.
A week or so earlier, I’d run into a friend and colleague at work. We caught up about her son, who’d been a few years behind me on the college football team, then she told me about a new professor in the health and exercise science department.
“Her name is Hayley. I think she’s around your age,” my friend said. “You should invite her to your Halloween party.”
Made sense to me. The more the merrier. At the time, I lived in a four-bedroom rental in Saint Peter with an assistant swim coach, a graduate assistant in sports information, and my best friend and former college roommate, Jake, who worked closing deals at the car lot in town. We had a great Gustavus social group with admission counselors and athletic coaches in their late 20s and early 30s, plus a broader cut of faculty and staff from various departments and ages. Most of us were connected in some way to a twice-weekly game of pickup soccer we fondly called “Noontime Boomtime.”
I was the college’s communications guy, so I was used to quick conversations with folks from across campus to check a number or get a quote for a story. I looked Hayley up in the directory and punched her extension into my phone.
“Hello?” she said.
Nice, I thought, it’s always good to catch someone at their desk on that first call.
“I’m JJ Akin from the marketing office,” I said. “I’m having a Halloween party on Saturday. You should come. Bring a friend.”
“Okay…” she replied. Looking back, it may have been a question rather than a commitment.
“Great,” I said. I gave her the details and hung up. One more item off the party-planning checklist.
I learned later that she thought the conversation was awkward and that it was weird that I’d called her office phone. So yeah, I guess the government is right. It is hard to be a straight white guy.
The party started around sundown. I mixed myself a Captain Morgan and Diet Coke in a yellow plastic takeout cup from Dickey’s Barbecue Pit.
The men’s basketball coach and his date were dressed as hippies. A fly fisherman in his mid-fifties, he approached life as sort of a wry amateur philosopher. If I squinted at his personality and considered replacing his usual bourbon with a different, um, reflective substance, I could picture him in Haight-Ashbury. Good costume.
A communication and gender studies professor showed up wearing a curly-haired wig and a high school letter jacket. “Marty” was embroidered on the chest. I knew him as a brilliant, moody scholar and documentary filmmaker. Now it made sense why he was so good during those lunchtime soccer games.
The woman who’d told me to invite Hayley was dressed, I believe, as Velma from Scooby Doo. Her husband was a Duke basketball player.
Hayley and a friend from grad school showed up dressed as 80s pop stars.
I was the construction worker from the Village People. I don’t recall if I was still wearing a hardhat when Hayley arrived. A couple of my buddies were sporting cowboy gear and motorcycle leathers to complete the look.
We met that first night but didn’t talk much. I was busy playing host to 30 or so guests and Hayley was happy to be meeting new friends and colleagues.
A few months later, I invited her over for dinner with a smaller group.
“It’s cool that your dad is a lobster fisherman,” one of my roommates at the time said to her. “Have you ever tried salmon?”
“Yes, I’ve eaten salmon,” Hayley said.
The guy was known for a trying a little too hard to make conversation. Still, he got a lot of first dates. I, for the record, went on very few first dates, but I almost always got a second one. Everybody has a different style, I guess.
Throughout that first year, Hayley settled into the broader friend group. She became good friends with a few women who worked in student life. We all played bar trivia together on Tuesdays and had a party every couple months to celebrate something or another.
By the next fall, things were starting to click between us.
I’d been sort-of dating a physical therapist from Mankato who came from very Catholic farming family in southern Minnesota. It was fine, but everyone could see it wasn’t going to work out. Hayley was doing some online dating. I remember her telling me about an accountant she met for dinner at a little restaurant that’s halfway between Saint Peter and the Twin Cities.
“Nice guy, but kind of boring,” she said.
Obviously, she needed to be with someone in a higher octane profession. Good thing I was a higher education administrator who did copy editing and sent out email newsletters. Talk about sex appeal.
In early December 2017, one of our other friends hosted a Christmas party. We ate and laughed and talked and somebody broke out a guitar and we all sang together. Hayley and I sat next to each other on the couch.
We had an easy connection. It didn’t feel like work the way dating in your late 20s and early 30s often does.
We talked about it a few weeks later.
“What do you think?” I asked
“We can give it a try,” she replied.
And they say romance is dead.
We’ve been together ever since.
So glad the two of you have given it a try!