A Little
Assembly
Required
For a man who would marry Paula after two and a half months of dating, Mike spent an impressive amount of time buying lunch.
Fortunately, Paula had a sister who was willing to help with more than the sandwiches.
Mike first found them while trying to arrange food for his workers’ Christmas party. There had been a Mexican restaurant at the address in Santa Ana, but Paula and her sister were preparing to open a little sandwich shop there. They didn’t make Mexican food. They weren’t catering. As a business errand, the visit was a thorough failure.
But when Mike’s eyes met Paula’s, he felt something wonderful about her. He asked when the shop would open.
A couple of weeks later, on its first morning, he arrived for coffee and a bagel. He came back for lunch. Then he kept coming: every day, the same dependable presence, a nice man Paula loved seeing walk through the door.
For the better part of a year, this arrangement worked beautifully for everything except getting them together.
Mike kept his feelings to himself, but Paula could see the look in his eyes. He looked like a man who wanted to ask her out and couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Smitten” was his word for it. Paula was shy herself. Neither was comfortable making an approach.
Help.
With dinner
attached.
Her sister supplied a way around that.
She bought Paula a barbecue that came in a box, with instructions, nuts, bolts, and more assembly than Paula felt capable of managing. Then she convinced Paula to ask Mike to come over and put it together. In return, Paula would make him a barbecue chicken dinner.
It was an excellent arrangement for two people who could apparently go on like this across a sandwich shop indefinitely. Paula could ask for help rather than a date. Mike would have a job to do, with dinner attached.
The sister did not leave Mike’s side of the transaction unattended. As he remembers it, his future sister-in-law made it clear that helping Paula was a good idea and that he ought to do it. This was not matchmaking left to chance. Both parties had been given their assignment.
Considerably
less assistance.
Once they were together away from the shop, they needed considerably less assistance.
By then, Paula knew she was interested in him, too. They were ready to make the connection. They could talk as friends and enjoy each other’s company, and Mike already felt he knew her character. His feelings had been growing through those months of visits; the time alone with her opened his heart. He knew he wanted to be with her—and to marry her.
Paula remembers mainly talking that first evening. She isn’t certain they even kissed goodnight. Mike remembers their first kiss and is fairly sure he made the move, though he can’t reconstruct what led up to it. What both remember clearly is how much harder it became to be apart.
Everyone else.
There was more to consider, however, than the two people having trouble saying goodnight. Both had been married before. Both had spent years as single parents. Getting married would not simply solve the problem of wanting more time together; it would change their children’s lives, too.
“Although it moved fast, we still took our time,” Mike says.
That sounds like a man trying to have it both ways, until he explains where the care went. Neither had opened a relationship to the children in this way before. Mike and Paula knew they were in love. Now they wanted to see how their children would do together.
They began with outings, more like family gatherings than dates. Mike took Paula to meet his parents, with the children along. His relationship with her was becoming a relationship with her daughter, too. The couple who had finally found a way to be alone together were making room for everyone else.
There is no spectacular incident in Paula’s memory that settled the family question. No child’s remark she preserves as the moment everything became clear. What she remembers is that it was comfortable.
For all the passion pulling the adults together, that quieter word mattered. In Paula’s account, the children’s time together was part of what made marriage feel right. They weren’t simply discovering how much they wanted each other. They were finding out what being together could mean.
Another attempt.
When Mike proposed, he chose a nice restaurant. He thought it would be romantic.
Paula had a different assessment. The restaurant was busy, and the occasion didn’t feel special enough. She wanted him to ask again.
Being shy did not mean she had no standards.
Later, when he took her home, she had him get down on one knee and make another attempt. The setting and posture received revisions. The words did not change much.
“Pretty much I said the same thing,” Mike remembers.
They laughed. He asked her to marry him. She said yes.
Paula describes herself as a “bit of a brat” about the proposals—two of them, possibly three, before she felt he had done it right. Mike’s account is gentler. That was what she wanted, and he wanted to make her happy.
It had felt right.
They could have spent a year engaged. But neither saw much reason to prolong the part in which they weren’t yet sharing a life. Paula was thirty-two; both knew what it was to manage on their own. They had brought the children together, and it had felt right. Her family would be coming down for Thanksgiving. It seemed the time to gather everyone, get married, and begin.
So they did, two and a half months after the barbecue had finally broken the stalemate.
With more than forty-one years of marriage to look back on, Paula calls Mike a wonderful man and their life together a wonderful life. Whatever was wild about the speed of the wedding, she has no doubt about the decision.
Her sister had been right: it was a good idea for Mike to go over and help.