jennanddave.com

...it was the late 90's. 1999 to be exact. After a few months of innocent flirtation and a few attempts at getting me to go out on a date with him, I finally agreed to go. When taking into consideration a guy as amazing as Dave is, you may be wondering why it took me so long to accept one of his invitations. To put it into perspective, one of the dates he suggested was to go see "Annie", which, if you know me, you know I have a mild to medium obsession with all things related to "Annie", so it was a pretty good bet on his part. Until he said his ex-girlfriend and her grandmother would also be going. Oops. After that I thought "What kind of guy is this," and stepped back a bit (proverbially) to take a better look at him. He was still cute though, so finally we made a date to go see Elizabeth which we followed up with bread-pudding, which is disgusting, but whatever.

Shortly after we started dating we were having dinner at one of the local diner's in Somerville, not the awesome one they featured on foodtv a few weeks ago, but another one which we later boycotted for being profoundly rude to my mom and grandmother. Since he's the Southern Gentleman, Dave paid for dinner, and because at the time I had two jobs and he was a grad student, I offered to at least cover the tip. As we were walking out of the diner Dave asked what I had left for a tip, and when I told him he got all wide-eyed and surprised, telling me I'd left way too much. When I said that I'd left 20%, he was all "No way, that was *way* more than 20%." Then he thought about it. And thought about it some more. Then he looked really embarrassed and said "Oh...yeah...right. That is 20%."

This wouldn't seem like a big deal, except that Dave's really good with numbers. He gets it from his parents, both of whom are mathematicians. When the three of them get together, sometimes they work on and talk about equations. For fun! No really! It's very intimidating. Thus, not being able to figure out 20% for a tip is kind of embarrassing, especially when your future wife, Little Miss English Major, now has something to lord over you for the rest of your life.

And I do.