Our Story-Chapter 382

Let's see, where were we in the Emilia and Todd story?

I believe I was dating a couple of guys and had a dream about Todd. In fact, in a fit of extreme unpracticality, I threw all common sense out the window and flew out to BYU for a weekend to visit one of the boys I was dating. (He was not LDS. Leave it to me to find a boy who is not only 2500 miles away from me, but also one of the few non-LDS at BYU...while I'm technically dating somebody else.) One of the days that I was out there visiting, the boy was in class and I was looking for someone to play with. So, I looked up Todd Smith in the student directory, called his apartment and left a message on his machine. After all, we had been sending mostly friendly emails for months. I figured he'd be easy for amusement for a couple of hours.

He never called me back.

I should mention that at that point in life I was rather unaccustomed to boys not calling me back. So, I was rather put out that he didn't try at some point during the weekend to return my message.

He claimed several years later that he'd never received the message, but I wonder if it was a small triumph for him to not call back the girl who'd never written back...

Nah. He can't lie. He must really not have gotten the message.

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About three months later, when I was on the verge of graduating and had managed to push away every guy who was interested in me (mostly through being mean and rotten to every one of them. I'm told there are nice ways to break up with someone, but I didn't know any of them.) I was running late at night on the streets of Princeton. As I was pushing myself to jog further than usual, I was pondering where I was in my life.

None of the guys I'd dated or had flings with were who I wanted to end up with. In theory, I could have married any of them and I would have made it work because they were all very good men who loved me. But none of them was quite right. So, I ran. It was a beautiful starry night. I remember thinking about how I was really blessed to have been offered my dream teaching position before I'd even graduated and how I was really okay with not dating anyone for awhile. In fact, I thought, perhaps I'd see how long I could go without falling into any dating or even fling-type relationships. (This was major for me. I am a serial kisser. In fact, I am a big proponant of kissing first to see if you actually want to go out with a person. A terrible kisser could be gently headed off at the relationship pass. Ahem. I should probably never be put in charge of the Young Women with this attitude.)

Almost as soon as I thought the non-relationship thought, as clear as day I heard in my head, "Yeah. But what about Todd Smith?"

I had not thought about Todd in any romantic sense since I was a young teenaged girl, so this was totally out of the blue! It was so ridiculous that I could feel myself blushing at the very thought! So, I laughed out loud, shook off the ridiculous notion, and walked home feeling slightly silly at thinking such a thing. AND I hadn't even seen Todd Smith since I was 17 years old!

That was May.

Todd and I were married the following December.