The following is a brief history of our life together, as told by Tom.

We met each by accident on a late summer night in 1998. I was on my way from Cincinnati to Akron, to visit my friend Matt, who was my roommate at Ohio University. I was driving to Akron by myself for the first time, so I guess I overestimated the duration of my trip.

So when I got to his house an hour or two early, I found Matt with a friend of his from work that summer, Mindy. She was beautiful and nice and didn't laugh when I came in with my cowboy hat on, so I knew I had to have her.

Unfortunately it took a while to convince her of this. She lived in Akron and went to school in Columbus, so if anything was going to happen it was going to be long distance from the start. For some reason this didn't bother me, but it would take a considerable amount of persuasion for Mindy to come to the same conclusion.

Normally, if it took months of waiting to have a shot at a girl, I would have lost interest and moved on, but I always thought there was something special about her, and I didn't quite know what it was. So about a half year later - the following February - we started talking online a bit more.

I was still interested, of course, and for some reason she started to come around. I knew she enjoyed friendly conflict, so it might have been our debate about the minimum wage that did the trick. Don't ask me, girls are just weird.

To make a long story short, she agreed to give me a chance. We started dating in early March of 1999, got engaged last summer, and soon we won't have to drive so much on the weekends.