Spencer’s version of how we met:
To start, let’s talk about how we met: It was late August 2004, and I had just graduated from McGill. Moving back home was a big adjustment and left me with a stark outlook for finding “a nice Jewish girl.” After a week of being home, I decided to put myself on the Jewish online dating service, JDate, assuming to make the most out of a humbling situation. After a week of looking at potentials, I had spotted a new potential: she was a Junior at UConn, pursuing a degree in psychology, in the marching band, and starting up a chapter of the Alpha Epsilon Phi Jewish sorority.
Within ten minutes of posting her profile, I started to instant message this girl, Judi. It turned out that her roommate was bored and wanted to lend support in finding “a nice Jewish guy.” (On a side note, this roommate’s mother was a former acquaintance of my mother.) We chatted for several hours over the course of the next few days, as I hadn’t started work yet, and she hadn’t started Fall classes yet.
On September 7, 2004, a friend of mine was having a birthday party in the UConn area. After only a few days of online conversation, I broached to Judi the idea of stopping by while I was in the neighbourhood–afterall, going to UConn all the time wouldn’t always be easy, no? It also turned out that, since she was in the marching band, she knew a friend of mine from high school, who reassured her of my good merit.
So I left the birthday party and stopped by her and her roommates’ place at Charter Oak Suites. For such an informal encounter, I brought with me an orange gerber daisy, instead of a cliched red rose. It was a rather awkward meeting since I was on foreign turf with the roommates around and anyone who knows Judi knows she has initial tendencies towards shyness. Most of what I recall of that “hang out” session in her room involved the absurdity in watching MTV’s Real World. However by the end of the week, she was already at my house, watching a movie (Amélie Poulain) and meeting my parents (eek!).
I was rather quickly off JDate, pursuing the natural evolution of a relationship through work and study, trying to push both of us into “bigger and better things,” and talking about our distance futures. By 2006, Judi had graduated and moved on to her Master of Social Work program at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus, while I had left the bank and gone to start my MBA at St. John’s University in New York. Though Judi initially lived in CT and commuted to New York for class on the weekends, she finally was able to join me in New York in 2007.
The stage was now set…
