How we met... and became friends.

It's fun to remember how we met and became friends before we ever considered dating. It was late summer 2009, and I'd been working at The Webb School as alumni relations director for not quite a year.

Mr. Puett was a new teacher that year, and we officially met at the welcome party. There were only two new teachers that year, and word travels fast at a small school, so I knew that this particular new teacher was from Portland, had recently graduated from Cornell, and would be teaching algebra and World Cultures. When I met him I remember thinking that Mr. Puett seemed like a very nice and interesting young teacher and that the kids were going to enjoy having him in class. I also remember that somehow I knew quickly that he was Catholic, and that he enjoyed wine tasting, and that I generally enjoyed talking to him.

At Webb, living on campus means that we work in the dorms as "dorm parents" to the kids. It's a rewarding (and eventually exhausting) job. The new teacher and I didn't really see each other all that much: he was teaching and I was always working, or traveling, or at fund-raising events, or training for the marathon. I wasn't in grad school yet, but I was planning to apply in the spring and it was a very busy semester!

Webb's boarding community is like a large extended family, so you always have a general idea of what everyone else is doing. I remember knowing that the nice, quiet new teacher got a coonhound puppy and named him "Sigi" after a character in a viking saga. Sure enough, "Mr. Puett" was a favorite for some of the girls in my dorm as a math tutor and World Cultures teacher. I started to notice that at lunch and dinner and weekend brunch the new teacher would usually choose a seat next to me, and I knew that I really enjoyed our conversations about increasingly random and esoteric topics. It seemed like we could always make each other smile. Every now and then our paths would cross as we walked across campus, and we'd stop and talk. It was really nice to feel like there was someone like-minded to talk to.

As time went on, we just became friends. He said he was starting to miss school of his own, and I recommended that he look at the local college. He kinda scoffed that MTSU would never have a night class he wanted to take, but sure enough, they had a graduate level class on Chaucer, and so I got to tease him a little about being pretentious and he got to take a graduate class in the spring. We had excellent brunch conversations that kept us at the table for hours, especially after I finished training for my marathon, before I started studying for the GMAT, when I had lots of free time on my hands. Eventually we started watching movies together in the dorm commons, often joined by the kids, who started to speculate about our romantic potential.

So it was the girls, my "dorm-daughters," who started to push me to date Mr. Puett. They tried every possible tactic to convince me that he was great boyfriend material. All along I laughed and insisted that we were just friends. But I was starting to realize how much I looked forward to seeing him and talking to him and spending time together.