Oh my goodness. Pat and I met Christmas of my junior year in college. I HATED him and he hated me. We were both working at a liquor store in Madison, N.J. He was the beer manager and I was a cashier/front-end supervisor. Technically speaking, he was my supervisor, though I did not treat him as such! When I say that we hated each other I really mean it. We got into such bad arguments that I got sent home from work on one occasion.
So anyway, we met around Christmas time. I was with someone who I subsequently broke up with. I came back to work at the end of the school year and I don't know what happened, but we really didn't argue all that much and I had actually forgotten about how much we didn't get along. I started hanging out with the guys from work, Pat being one of them. We'd go to the bar and watch the baseball game or the hockey finals, and it got to the point where it started being just Pat and me rather than a big group of us. Finally, one night he decided to ask me out on a real date. We went to this great Italian restaurant and had a really nice time. About a week later we were sitting in his car talking when he took off my Irish Claddagh ring and turned it around and asked me to start dating. That was June 19, 2001 and we've been together ever since.
We weren't really dating for all that long when the subject of marriage and "the one" came up. I actually think we were having an argument about our relationship — I wanted to know where it was going because I was not going to waste my time in something that was a dead end. Pat looked at me and told me that he wanted to marry me and that he would do it today, but it was way too soon. He told me that he was afraid to ask me to start looking at rings because he didn't want to scare me off, and then he said to me, "If I asked you to marry me today, would you?" And without missing a beat I said, "Yes." I knew from very early on that he was it for me.
