How Did Your Parents Meet?

So how did your parents meet? As for mine, it will always be a bit of a mystery. My father was from California, mother from Arkansas, and all I know is it had something to do with an Army buddy of my father’s during his single hitch. I guess the Army buddy was from my mother’s hometown in northwestern Arkansas, but my father was stationed in Nevada, and what prompted him to make the journey to Arkansas – quite a distance to go for just a date back in those pre-interstate days – is anyone’s guess. The Army buddy seems to have disappeared and been forgotten after my father’s hitch. There is some circumstantial evidence that they “had” to get married, with the pregnancy and maybe even the one following eventually resulting in miscarriage, but I guess I’ll never know for sure.

Both had moved to California after WW2 to teach and ended up at the same school in Southern California. Dad had been divorced for about 4 years when they met.

My mother had an affair with a married man, got pregnant with me, and he bailed on her. She was 5 months pregnant with me when she answered an older divorced man’s ad for a babysitter to his 5 children. They fell in love (or something like it) and were married when I was two months old. I didn’t know this complete version of events until a few years ago, when my mom was already starting to lose herself to Alzheimers. She was so ashamed of what she had done. It explained a LOT to me. She was 19 and pregnant out of wedlock in 1967. I would have been so much more understanding of her life choices, and kinder to her, had I known much earlier.

I asked my mother this after my dad had passed away so I never heard his version of events.

My dad was in the Air Force. He had been stationed in Hawaii, at that time, being stationed there was kind of a drag as there was nothing there but a base. So he was stationed at Edwards in southern California and his friend was dating a woman (my aunt) and asked her to arrange a date for him. So she got her sister to go out with this guy.

My mom says that she didn’t really want to go and she sat as far away from him in the backseat as possible and only gave a very quick peck on the cheek goodnight. Dad had just made Sargent and he had about 6 months pay in his pocket. (from being stationed in Hawaii) The next day he bought a car and drove over to my mother’s place and asked her to marry him.

She said no.

But she did agree to a second date. He continued to ask her to marry him for about two months and she finally said yes. Mom insisted that dad was just ready to settle down, having made Sargent he knew he could support a family and she didn’t think he was just struck by her and that he would have done the same to whomever he went out with that night.

My mom’s sister was friends with my dad’s brother’s wife or something? Why do I only kind of know the answer to this? I really have no idea how they met beyond that, if they were deliberately set up or what.

I’d tell you, but it’ll take 8 seasons of a TV series.

My mom was a disabled youngest child who “ran away from home” in 1966 at the age of 22. She went to live as a squatter in Gaslight Square in St. Louis, MO. She went by an assumed name that she took from a novel.

My dad, one year her junior, hadn’t been out of the Marines for long. He was also a Gaslight Square squatter. Apparently that was not unusual in that place and time.

They both worked at a little Mexican place. She cooked and he washed dishes. They became friends over a shared love of the comic strip, Pogo. They each had a collection of Pogo books, and he would visit her so they could share the ones that they didn’t both have.

They moved to Louisville, KY (my mom’s hometown) and got married in 1967.

For my parents this took place around 1957, I guess, when they were mid-teens.

My dad had grown up on a sheep farm in country Victoria. My mother had only been in Australia for a year or so, her family having emigrated here from Holland post-WW2 after spending years as Japanese POW’s in Indonesia.

Both went to the small local school (an all-grades-from-1-to-12-in-the-same-class sort of place). My dad locked my mum in the school toilet and (ever the scientist and chemist) threw a home-made stink-bomb in with her. Apparently from then on it was love.

After his military service, one of Daddy’s Army buddies helped him get a job with Southern Bell, in my mother’s home town. Mom was a teenage waitress at her parents’ restaurant, and her first words about her future husband was “Mama, some fool wants a T-bone steak, lightly burnt.” (Order to the kitchen - Grandmother was cooking.) This was in 1966, they married in 1967, and Daddy died in 1978.

And Zebra, your story reminds me of my grandparents’ courtship. It was during World War II, and grandmother had moved to Hinesville, Georgia (home of “Camp Swampy”/Fort Stewart) to find work after high school. Granddaddy’s family was from the area, but he had enlisted at the start of the war. Uncle Sam decided he didn’t need Granddaddy, though, because he was completely blind in one eye, so my grandfather returned home and was driving a taxicab. He had coffee at the lunch counter where Grandmother worked, was smitten, and asked her out.

She said no. Apparently, several times. Finally, persistence won the day. They were married for 43 years, and Granddaddy was just as smitten all those years later…

They met in high school chem class. He passed notes to try to get answers from her and teased her. She didn’t like him so much then. :smiley:
She got to like him later and married when they had been out of high school for 8 years.

My mother was visiting Germany, and while leaving the Cologne Cathedral, she was hit by a motorcycle and had a compound fracture of her arm. She didn’t speak German and was confused and hurt. So this American guy who was fluent in German offered to accompany her to the hospital and translate for her. They were married a year later.

B O R I N G. They both worked at the same place.

My adoptive mother and father were bootleggers. My father got killed in a car accident. My step-father, who was one of their customers, got together with my mother and they got married. 1950s.

Thinking about it some more, my father lived in or near the capital of a Western state after the Army, and he had several roommates. I am certain he met my mother through an Army buddy, but I’m not certain it was while they were in the Army. The buddy may also have been one of the roommates. He certainly disappeared at some point early on, rarely to be referred to forever after. I don’t think I ever even heard his name. That state capital is where I was born, as my parents lived there when they were first married. But I’m fairly certain all courting took place in Arkansas, they were definitely married in church in my mother’s hometown, and as best I can tell she never went out West until after they were married. Then we moved to Arkansas when I was two to be closer to my mother’s family before settling in Texas in the wake of a job offer just before I turned six.

They met in 8th grade art class. And yes, they both became artists.

But for a while, in high school my mother dated Jerry Siegel, the creator of Superman.

Mom was born here in my hometown. Dad, who was about four years older, moved here with his sister, who got a job teaching at parochial school for a couple of years. He’d been born not far away, but had lived in several towns and cities all over, as his mother lived with one or the other of her adult children. Dad was the youngest, and his father, a minister had died when Dad was just seven. They met at church events, and Dad mentioned to a friend of my mother’s that he was thinking of asking her out. Friend tells Mom of course, and when no date had yet been requested Mom told friend, friend asked Dad “what’s up with this?”, Dad did ask Mom out, and the rest is history.

I do like how my grandparents met too.

Grandma and Grandpa lived in the same area, out in the country, but because Grandpa was four years older, and had been made to leave school, by his parents, after the eighth grade, they’d never been around each other.

Grandma, at nineteen, got a certificate for teaching school, and was teacher in a one-room school house, in 1923. One day she arrived at school and realized she’d forgotten the door key. Grandpa was across the road, plowing a field with four mules. He helped boost her through the window so she could open the door from the inside, and that’s how they first officially met.

Grandpa was only helping out his folks that spring, with the plowing, so it’s lucky that he was out there. He’d left home at eighteen because he didn’t want to be a farmer, like his folks were trying to make him be. He went to Kansas City to an auto mechanics school, and never did go back to the farm full time. He did car work and railroad work and such. I wonder what he would have done if he could have gone on in school, as he’d wanted to.

In college at the start of the civil rights movement. They were both involved in the movement and were reporting on it at the student newspaper.

Mutual friends.

My moms best friend in college dated my dad’s best friend. Naturally, the best friends introduced them to each other.

My dad was very much a nerd and completely oblivious as to how decent looking he really was. My mom was more vivacious and goalgetting.

They got sort-of-accidentally pregnant. As my dad told me: “protection was not very good in those days, but I was okay with the possibility of your mom getting pregnant because I already had made up my mind that a marriage would be okay”.

My mom told me she had done a pregnancy test (which, in those days, involved a pharmacist and a live frog). And that the pharmacist told her the bad news on the (pay)phone and then, in an icy tone, that she was on her own and “he could not help her”.

Anyway, my dad told his parents, and he was stupid enough to do it with my mom present. So my mom got subjected to her inlaw parents initial shock and dismay. Nice way to start a relationhip with your inlaws. :rolleyes:

It helped somewhat that both my parents were of similar social standing.

My mom married when she was five months pregnant. They had a mediocre to okay marriage for 25 years, then a divorce.

My parents met at the original Shakey’s Pizza.