*Wedding Wednesday: How I Met My Groom

Hello there! If you read my year-ender and my last entry (a tearjerker according to my friends), then you know that I'm getting married soon. Many people close to us say it's been a long wait, but they are very happy now that we finally decided to take on the next chapter in our lives.

Jay and I have been together since third year high school. That's 16 years ago. We broke up a couple of times, but we still found our way back to each other, and here we are! I just want to tell you a little story about how we met and how our love story developed.

The year was 1999. I was a new student at New Era University, and I was missing my grade school friends, whom I was with for several years. My old school, Our Lord's Grace Montessori, only had three sections per grade so we pretty much knew everyone. When I transferred to NEU, I was a bit culture-shocked to find each year had 15 sections. That's like the whole grade school batch from OLGM!

Thankfully, it wasn't hard to gain new friends. A girl approached me one day and asked if we could eat recess together. That girl was Niña, and 18 years later she would become my maid of honor. Along with Raga and Tami, Niña and I became inseparable. But aside from girlfriends, I also busied myself with joining various clubs and extra-curricular activities. I became a freshman coordinator for a couple of clubs, which meant I went around different sections to let other members know if there were certain announcements and upcoming events.

With Niña (left), my first friend in high school.

Tami, Me, Marti, and Niña

It was during one of these rounds that I came across a certain boy who didn't look me in the eye when I talked to him. Rude, I thought. Cute, but rude. He was thin, with fair complexion, round eyes and long lashes, and a sharp nose so unlike my flat and wide one. But he was really quiet. I don't think he even uttered a single word after I relayed the club information, he just nodded and went back to their classroom.

Somehow I found out who he was, that he was an honor student, good in Math, best friends with the grade school valedictorian Jed (who would also become his best man). I found this out not because I was already interested in him, but because our sections were kind of competitors. We were in two of the three top sections.

Aside from the usual school contests, I didn't encounter him again during freshman year. But in second year, I found out the dreaded news that my new section included students who were mostly not from my old one, Jay and Jed included.

We have to thank our Filipino class for bringing us closer, though. In NEU, seating arrangement usually changes every period, and we were seated beside each other for Ms. Agapito's class. It's hard to explain how it happened, because we were supposed to be listening to our teacher, but Jay and I ended up talking A LOT then. We were seated at the back, probably the second to the last row, and I remember he was at the leftmost column, right next to the window. I'm going to go a little YA novel here and describe how when I looked at Jay, he had a halo of light behind him and it made me want to listen to him more, especially because he was always so quiet. He seldom talked outside of recitation time, and he rarely talked to girls. So Filipino class was a special time. We talked about movie plots, music, wrestling, and books. I told him about the stories I read about real-life "miracles " (more like serendipitous/Chicken Soup for the Soul stuff), and he told me about Robin Williams' Bicentennial Man (1999). 

Jay told me the entire story of Bicentennial Man during Filipino class

A scene from Bicentennial Man (source: IMDB). 

Then we had a presentation for Linggo ng Wika, where we had to do an interpretative dance that involved wearing black clothes and white gloves, wave yards of fabric in Philippine flag colors, while the song "Dakilang Lahi" sung by Ciara Sotto was playing. At one point in the presentation, we had to form a big heart, shaped with our hands, and we would make it beat (as in dugdug, dugdug beat). So our hands should be coordinated while pushing them back and forth at the same time. The lights would be out during the presentation, so our white gloves would glow, it was really cool.

Somehow, Jay and I ended up together during the heart part. As you can see in the photo below  (I'm the one in the glasses, with my left arm covering most of my face, and Jay is the one behind me looking slightly at the camera.), only a teeny, tiny part of our hands touched. But in high school, every little thing counts and is amplified when it came to your crush. You can say we looked forward to practice.

How I found out he had a crush on me was a bit tricky. But it involved index cards, my name written down, and a classmate accidentally seeing it. My friend Marti (also one of my bridesmaids), teased me whenever Jay was called on to recite. During our year-end party, we had an exchange gift, and with the help of our friend Doy and a little name-switching, Jay and I got each other as recipients. I gave him a WWF (now WWE) poster, while he gave me a stuffed red and yellow heart pillow from Blue Magic. Before the school year ended, we also played the leads in our Filipino play, Florante at Laura. 

That's Jay on the topmost row, with his arms in an X-shape in front of him (a gesture from WWE wrestlers who were DX members). I'm fourth from right, standing second row.

So that's how I met my groom. A lot of other things happened that year, and this is just a little snippet. Our love story is long and winding, and one blog entry is not enough. I just wanted to share how it's possible to meet the love of your life in high school, and get married to them more than a decade later.

How did you meet your groom? Sound off in the comments, I would love to know your story!

*Wedding Wednesday will be about my wedding preparations, tips, and reviews. Watch for my entries and join me in my wedding journey!