I don’t even remember how I got to that guy’s hotel room. He was staying at the Marriott downtown, which was uncharacteristic of him at the time.
I do remember stopping for gas in Stockbridge on the way to pick him up. I was wearing a purple dress with thin straps that had sequins on them. It was relatively low cut; I couldn’t wear a bra with the dress because of the straps and low cut issues. I do remember the smile from a random guy when I stopped to get gas at that gas station.
I chose to wear the exact same dress to my first date with Jared precisely a week later. It remains in my closet to this day. Occasionally despite weighing a tad more, I still pull it out to wear it even these days when I am feeling like it.
You know what else? I remember not one little thing about seeing that show, Les Mis, with the other guy. Except I remember being utterly impressed by the cast; so much so that I knew I wanted to see the show with Jared before it left Atlanta.
Which is how I bought tickets to Les Mis for the next weekend, called Jared and offered him the other ticket, and that is why Jared asked off for the Friday of his very first week of employment with Grinnell College— because I’d offered him tickets to the show the weekend before he started work, and he’d said yes. He told Grinnell he had a prior commitment. He probably didn’t tell them the prior commitment was made the night before he started work at his new job that Monday.
It’s pretty strange though that I remember not a thing about that evening with the other guy, the week prior to the show with Jared. I don’t remember dinner— surely we went to dinner, probably at the Spaghetti Factory— because it was my normal regular favorite haunt at the time.
I don’t remember dinner, I have vague recollections of sitting beside the guy at the Fox (with the emphasis being on the stellar cast, not the company) I have not one memory of saying goodbye to him that evening. I remember I must have been driving but I have zero recollection of saying goodbye.
And I do very vividly remember the other guy pretty much verbatim asking “Can we talk about marriage?”
And I really wish I could go back and look at my face, and see my reaction. It was not a proposal. It was a non-proposal, in fact.
And that is pretty flabbergasting, actually, that I remember so very little. It’s not every day that someone asks you to talk about marriage, which is exactly what happened in that hotel room; that is all that happened for once in that hotel room.
I thought about the other guy’s peculiar, intentionally degrading personal preferences in that moment. I thought about the glances he gave other women, glances he didn’t even try to hide, when we were out together. I thought about not being included in his graduation festivities.
The other guy was too late in September of 2003.
I did say no to that already moderately middle-aged professional deep into his new career path. He lied too much. There had been too many lies in the five years’ previous and I’m pretty sure I said something precisely to that effect. I gave not one thought at all to his career trajectory, or a comfortable lifestyle that might follow. I gave not a single thought at all to the fact that the irony was lost; if he’d asked three months prior— if he’d bothered to show up to my GSU graduation– I would have had a different life altogether.
As it was, then I told him I was talking to a guy online, and I wanted to see where it went, that I was pretty sure it could get serious quickly. I probably told him his name was Jared and that he lived in Iowa.
Which, actually, is pretty darn astounding. Replaying what little of the scene I do remember in my head is head-spinning because saying no to that guy in any capacity was uncharacteristic for me.
This would have been September 13, 2003. I know this because I saw the exact same Les Mis show (sadly with a replacement Valjean) the very next week, September 20, with Jared.
I’d started talking to Jared in early July, 2003.
Two months. Maybe a month and a half— MAYBE— of chatting on the phone. Probably not much more than a month of actual video chatting.
It took that little time, and I knew for certain that I was done with the other guy, to the exclusion of marriage entirely.
Even 23 years later, the sequence astounds me. I’d seen the guy for five years. I’d pined away for him for most of that time, lamenting my tangentially insignificant place in his life.
And probably it makes perfect sense to people who have known Jared for decades, and it makes sense to me now because I know my huband intimately now. But to 23-year old me, with the power differential involved, with the unique history…..
The fact that I told that man no with hardly a thought— with hardly a pause— I told him no to marriage talk for the very, very remote possibility that something might happen with someone who lived 900 miles away–
That speaks to the level of respect, to the level of care Jared presented from the start for our relationship.
And Jared did know about who I was going to that show with. I have never asked him, but maybe he sat around all that particular Saturday evening, one of his first nights in Grinnell, channeling his inner karmic medium to be able to influence my emotions. Those who know Jared well know about his ability to influence people in that way when he so has a mind to do so. Maybe my strength came from knowing that he was going to be around, that it was going to somehow work out. I’d gotten that vibe from the very first conversation online the previous July.
Because I don’t really know what got into me either that weekend, to ask him to that show, to buy the tickets before he even had a plane ticket. We’d never met in person. I knew enough to know he wasn’t likely a scary person. But the whole situation was kind of out of character.
It was out of my safe zone. I don’t know that my friends would have said I was exactly predictable before, but inviting some random guy I met on the internet….IN 2003…..that was NOT in my newly-graduated plans.
It doesn’t bother me that I don’t remember much about a proposal that wasn’t a proposal. It’s odd, but the important weekend was the weekend after.
And somehow, the fact that the scene didn’t end in the early 2000s, that there was renewed contact which brought me to know current events and his levels of world-class success, brings to mind the scene in “A Christmas Carol” in which Belle’s husband tells her he has gone past Scrooge’s office and he was bent over his desk counting his ledger on Christmas Eve, and Belle remarks how she feels pity for him, as her children with her husband run around them both.
That is exactly the precise emotional feeling I am left with after I have processed a lot of anger and angst and drama…..I feel sorry for him and his circumstances, even with and perhaps precisely in part because of his massively successful professional life.
And I sort of gawk as I sit here in June of 2026, with Jared sitting directly across from me as I type this sitting at Gallery Row in Carrollton, Georgia, my hometown. Because the circumstances that surround our meeting could be straight out of a book, and it is normal to me.
Because it really happened….Jared and I really started chatting online, with a simple “smile” exchanged on Lavalife, on June 30, and July 1, 2003. What is so simple as an every day “swipe left” in modern times was a delicious little stigmatized secret in the summer of 2003. And yet here we are, and we have built a life together that still somehow makes me know that everything will be okay no matter what.
But I don’t think most people who interact with Jared and me on a daily basis in any capacity really much stop to think that yes, in 2003….Jared lived in Nebraska, moved to Iowa late that summer, with no plans to move to Georgia….Jared had never even been to Georgia until September of 2003….except that he saw a very dim photo of me online and I made him laugh at my writing because I talked about liking cheese and cats on a dating profile.
And Jared successfully guessed that my screen name “Cosettecie” was based off my love of Les Mis (I wasn’t terribly original as I paired my initials with it)…..and he wrote to me like an actual human being with actual feelings. Even in the landscape of 2003 online dating, that approach was a pretty darn refreshing way of speaking online to a woman you thought you might date.
And there was very much a proposal a little over a year later, in October of 2004, with Jared right on his knee with a ring and a rose, right by my desk in the basement at Fernbank, shocking me that he was even in the state the night of Timeless. An actual romantic proposal in which I said yes…..after I had to be reminded to do so because I was in shock, not out of hesitation, after I took the ring box and showed my boss.
Is that something anybody else has done? Take the ring, without giving an answer, to show off to someone else? Because yes, that is indeed something I did. And Jared, laughing every time, never lets me forget it.
