I would love to know your love story. Can youtell me how you met your DH?
Love story! The short version is "we met at work, and it's pretty neat to be in the same professional field as the love of my life." The long story is... long, because I love details
Both of my parents are deaf, a fact which loomed very large during my undergraduate education. My mother told me often that sign language interpreting would be a great way to support myself (especially since I majored in drama, aka "Would you like fries with that?"!), and I was always very stubbornly against going into something I perceived to be "the family business"--until several months after graduation when I was living in my parents' basement and waitressing during the lunch shift. Not much of a glittering career! So I didn't resist too much when she set up a screening at an interpreting company run by an old friend of hers, nor when they offered me a full-time job. It turned out that I was pretty good at interpreting, so... That worked out, in spite of my eye-rolls and protestations growing up.
Fast forward about a year and a half, and I was getting ready to jump ship from the company and start work at a public school system closer to my home. At the last quarterly staff meeting I attended with the company, the new hires stood up to do quick introductions. In addition to plenty of interpreters, the company had always had some employees who are deaf and primarily use sign language, as well as some employees who are hearing and can't sign very well.So, large staff meetings usually have folks providing the interpreting, but there's a weird dynamic wherein many people who *do* both speak and sign (interpreters, etc) go ahead and do both simultaneously,"so the interpreters don't have to work as hard to support the entire meeting." This is problematic because, while it does let the interpreters off the hook, speaking and signing simultaneously is kind of a lousy compromise that usually degrades the quality of your communication in one or both languages. It's hard to express yourself grammatically correctly in two completely separate languages at once!
So, despite the issue of the language not being that high-level, the standard during staff meetings at that time was that many people went ahead and communicated simultaneously, in an effort to be "nice." The first new hire got up and introduced herself in simultaneous speech/sign; the second person did the same thing. Then, a handsome guy got up and started signing with no voice at all, and he said: "I don't do the simultaneous thing, so somebody's going to have to interpret for me." Whoa! Who was THIS guy with the enormous ego?! Sure was cute, though...
And that's the man I married.
I decided very quickly that since I was about to leave the company, I had nothing to lose but my pride, so I put the flirt on pretty hard. The first words I spoke to him were the answer to a crossword puzzle hint, which I read over his shoulder as he was working on it. At a happy hour with coworkers, a friend asked me, "So are you two dating or what?" The following Friday, I caaaaaasually suggested another happy hour, and he was immediately enthusiastic... But nobody else wanted to go, except for one girl--who insisted that we go to the mall instead of out for a drink! Neither he nor I had any interest in going to the mall, but we DID want to hang out, so we ended up at the mall with our oblivious coworker who literally tried on clothes for several hours, while we tried to get rid of her so we could flirt some more.
We finally managed to exchange numbers and set up an actual date, where he told me that he was in the process of getting a divorce. A light bulb came on... I hadn't been able to figure out why a straight male interpreter hadn't been snapped up yet, because in our field they are shockingly rare. Still more unusual, he didn't have any deaf family--that almost never happens with straight men; they just don't go into interpreting unless there's a family reason. There are plenty of gay men, but very very few straight ones in the profession. (I used to think this was just my family being bigoted, but now that I've been a working professional for thirteen years, the numbers just don't lie! They're rare.)
I don't know what I thought I was doing, a twenty-two-year-old idiot who didn't really know anything about real relationships, trying to date a divorcé, but I really really liked him, so I jumped in with both feet. Six months in, he broke up with me because our intentions were so mismatched, but... Two months after that, he came back and said that his feelings had really changed after spending some time apart. Young as I was, I'd truly never had such an honest,straightforward, respectful breakup, and the manner in which he'd let me down convinced me that he was for real when he said he'd like to give itanother try. The relationship was instantly and permanently on a completely different level when we got back together, and we've been together ever since.
All of this beginning stuff went down about ten years ago. Since then:
We have:
moved away from DC (where we met) and to his hometown of Berkeley,
gotten married and had a child,
decided to come back to DC for his schooling,
had a second child,
and gotten started on our third.
He has:
worked full-time at the supervisory level in DC,
dropped back down to staffer in California,
come back to DC to pursue a PhD program,
completed his coursework, begun his dissertation,
and become a full-time Dad.
I have:
gotten a master's degree and tried on a teaching career (didn't fit),
done a bunch of freelance interpreting,
blundered my way into a government job and become sole breadwinner for our family,
and begun to pursue a sometimes-confusing array of career possibilities.
The biggest goal for us right now is to get back to California, but with a stay at home parent, and preferably with no break in my federal service... So that's kind of a tall order. We are working on it, though.
The thing I love best about my husband is his integrity. He is the most consistent, morally rigorous person I know, and it's challenging sometimes and I occasionally wish he could just be a liiiiiiittle bit flexible about ethics, but honestly, I'm just so much of a better person because of him, since being with him holds me to that standard as well. I admire him very much, in addition to, you know, being in love with him.
The other BIG deal I want to mention is how amazing it's been to have him integrate seamlessly into my family. I'd never dated anyone who could sign before, so the process of Meeting the Parents had always been a big scary thing to my dates--I'd teach them how to fingerspell their name and "Nice to meet you," reassure them a zillion times that I'd be right there to interpret, etc etc etc. With the man I went on to marry, we walked into the room, I said "Mom, Dad, this is my boyfriend, you three catch up, I'm going to go get a drink," and it was that easy. They actually didn't like him the first time they met him, because he didn't bother sucking up to the scary scary deaf people! He just acted like himself, and they weren't used to that. It's pretty great, now, to know that he has a real relationship with his in-laws and extended family. And, although my master's degree is not in a field that I use, I'm very proud that we're both alumni of the same deaf university, and that the two of us bring our family tally to eight graduates of the same school.