Devin and I have been married now for 6.5 years and I’m realizing more and more that when we talk about when we first started dating, the details are getting fuzzy. I love how we met and I love how God ended up weaving everything together. Lucky for me, I documented everything to a tee and I’ve been reading through all of my blog archives from my whole undergrad period for the past few weeks crying and laughing my head off. These memories are so sweet, but my time dating Devin was really just the best. And… I’ll intersperse some ridiculous photos of me doing stuff like a weirdo in college for fun in this post too 😉 .
part 1: is here
part 2: dating and falling in love
part 3: our engagement story
SOPHOMORE YEAR
I saw Tricia when I entered the lecture hall for my Physical Science class at BYU. I started to quickly back out of the doorway hoping that she wouldn’t notice me and decided I was just going to drop the class. Before she yelled “Hey Autumn! Sit next to me and my husband!” My heart sank.
I had dated Tricia’s husband’s freshman roommate and best man and we had gone on a few double dates; I loved their friend group, went to her birthday party, but I had just been dumped a week earlier and I had no idea if they knew. I figured they wouldn’t want to be friends with me anymore, but instead Tricia and Ryan never brought up the topic for a few weeks and it was really fun to have a class with people I knew.
I finally brought up that I indeed had been dumped. As soon as I mentioned it, they both were like “I know” and Tricia said she wanted to set me up with one of her friends so it worked out anyway. Ryan, her husband, groaned and said that was awkward. I started laughing when she told me that this guy was still on his mission in Australia (it was March) and that he wouldn’t be back in Utah until the fall. She invited me to this guy’s mission homecoming party and I said that it would be weird and declined. She made the comment that fall was a really long time and I could already be dating someone, but she hoped she could set us up.
Regardless, Tricia and I continued our friendship and every once in a while in between class breaks Tricia and I would catch up.
It snows a lot in Utah, but one day our three story apartment complex started having a three story snowball fight. To be able to leave your apartment, you basically had to have a cookie sheet to shield yourself. People also made snowballs and carried them up three flights to have a height advantage haha
Halloween was so cold that I decided to stay in. My roommates had some parties to attend, but I was at home blogging 🙂 . Some things never change.
We totally stole a couch and left a ransom note for it. Well, the apartment did bring us breakfast, but I don’t think anyone wants to eat rotten milk 🙂 . The couch was returned after a threat was made to put my roommate’s truck on blocks.
I had the best guy friends a girl could ask for in college. I asked them to deck out my apartment in the most ridiculous way they could think of for Valentine’s day. I never told anyone who did it and people asked me about it for years; they decorated the outside of my apartment in ski masks at 3 AM.
This was my favorite tree on campus. It ended up being cut down two summers later, I cried.
SENIOR YEAR
I was out of a 16-month relationship and had tried to do the “let’s try to be friends and make this thing work” thing for the whole fall semester which was frankly stupid. I had developed a lot of insecurities and baggage, but also learned a lot of character building life lessons that I needed. I went to the gym every night to work off anxiety, was going to counseling, and I was not interested in dating at all. I was no longer the boy crazy girl that I went to college as and I began to really focus on my self-development and myself. I was in an all female major and I was extremely focused on my teaching program that I had been in for a semester. For the first time in college, I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be. I loved learning what I was learning and I had decided I wanted to go to graduate school in Washington when I graduated. My head was full of teaching day dreams and careers.
I started to see Tricia around campus all of the time now. I looked that guy up on facebook every once in a while and it looked like he was dating someone so I figured that I was safe and she wouldn’t bring him up. After a month of running into her a few times every week, she told me that she wanted to still set me up with her friend. My stomach dropped, but my second thought was “this would be a good story if it worked out though.” I told her I would go on the date solely because she had tried for two years to set us up. I gave her my phone number and I mostly forgot about it.
I was always out with my friends taking photos with my camera and blogging. I always thought it was a lot of fun and it had us explore a lot of places we didn’t normally go.
I put this photo because this was the Provo Tabnernacle. We always had large church meetings here throughout my whole college experience. One day before we were married, we found that it had been gutted by a fire. I am so excited to go back to Provo and see it as a temple now!
I bought a trampoline for exercising on really cold days. It got great use as my roommate Taylor and I would see how far we could push it away from our beds to jump onto them. Hint: she was several inches taller than me and I could never clear her beds that were on cinder blocks haha!
JANUARY 2010
I was walking to class and my phone began ringing with an Arizona number. I almost clicked ignore call, but I decided to pick up and Devin introduced himself and asked me on a double date. He laughed a lot and he sounded like a happy person. I had a week to prepare to go on a date with someone I really had no clue about.
The night of the date came around and while I was getting ready, Devin called to say that the Tricia and Ryan’s babysitter was delayed and he would be late. After a hour, I kind of began wondering if I was getting stood up. Our door had a knock and my roommate Taylor opened the door. I was still kind of feeling really awkward about this situation so I was hiding in the back of our apartment and Taylor came back and started teasing me. I walked around of the room and saw Devin in person, and not on facebook, for the first time. He was smiling and had his hip popped. I remember his eye had a twinkle in it (don’t judge me, I’m serious). As we were leaving the apartment, Taylor made a sound from this hilarious SNL sketch that we both watched all of the time and I died laughing.
Devin looked at me and was just like “uhh, want to explain?” I explained that Taylor and I had decided that blind dates may be initially uncomfortable, but we couldn’t be as bad as the person in this skit. We both laughed and rushed to meet Tricia and Ryan. We woofed down our pizza without room for talking because we had a comedy show and we were really crunched for time now. At the comedy show, we couldn’t talk at all and our group conversation at home was kind of stiff and awkward.
This was a selfie I took the week before Devin and I went on our first date. I have to appreciate what the lack of humidity did for my hair 🙂 .
Devin is shy and I’m quiet with people I don’t know. Our first date conversation consisted of trying to talk about mutual books we liked- none were in common. We talked about what we did in high school- nothing in common. I asked him about his major and I said that someone has to be good at math. Beyond that though, Tricia and Ryan joked around every once in a while and tried to keep the conversation going. I could see that Tricia really wanted this to work out, but we literally had nothing to talk about.
Devin walked me to my door and I stood there baffled because I realized I still didn’t really know anything about him. I knew that I really liked Ryan and Tricia and I really liked their friends a lot, but I just had a huge question mark about Devin. I gave him a hug, thanked him for the date, and said “Tricia is really invested in this working out and I don’t know a single thing about you still. We should just try this one more time.” He started laughing and said “sure.”
I walked in my apartment while my roommate teased me. I told her my date was boring, but she said he sounded nice because he laughed so much. I didn’t think much about it when I went into my apartment and I certainly didn’t realize… that was my first date with my husband.