Valentines’ Day, February, 1993. I had gotten my ass dumped by an individual I was kinda/sorta dating my freshman year of college. Turns out I dodged a serious bullet there (phrases like “chlamydia treatments” and “kicked out of England on drug charges” would be applied to this individual in the coming months/years), but yeah, at the time, it hurt, at least a little bit.

This individual, rather than have to deal with me in the dumping aftermath (which wouldn’t have been an issue anyway, to be honest – it wasn’t that serious), put some mutual friends up to the task of keeping me occupied so I wouldn’t be a bother. Those friends, it seemed, had a plan for the next evening to hang out in somebody’s dorm room and watch some movies on videotape. They dragged me along. ‘Twas a double-feature: Sister Act and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

One of those friends had a cute roommate. A quiet, bookish brunette who’d I’d seen around before, but never really gotten to know over the previous several months. This cute roommate was it seems, driven wild with lust by my impressive ability to quote the whole of the script to that 1975 comedy classic (I shall be ever thankful for my high school Boy Scout troop for that one), causing her to latch onto me, leading us to stay up late into the night, talking about everything and anything until we passed out on her loft bed, where, much to her chagrin, she would later admit, I was a perfect gentleman.

Twenty-four years later, she’s still keeping me around, and is still occasionally driven wild with lust by my ability to quote the scripts to cult movies, but mostly, is a loving, wonderful, and still dead sexy spouse and partner who I don’t know what the heck I’d do without.

I love you.