How did your parents meet?

[paul101]

So,how did your parents meet?

Mine met,when my mum was in Hong Kong to promote her modeling.
She met my dad in an Irish restaurant.

[lisa91]

Mine met in school when they were like 16 years old.

[Kush]

I actually have no idea. I think they met at Uni.

[furbob]

Mine met at work and used to catch the same train home together

[betahat]

My parents met at Cambridge - him a long in the tooth graduate student, her a bright-eyed first-year undergrad. He was instructed to deliver some chinese sausage to her by a mutual acquaintance who apparently had designs on my dad (ok that sounds bad when I read it again). They met and he probably saw her reading some dense tome of sociology and was instantly smitten. I think they moved in after a year. They had some coincidental stuff in common that might have helped - both were born in Singapore and had spent large amounts of time in South-East Asia, both had family connections in Canada - but mostly they were both eggheads.

[admin]

Jan 27, 2009 17:20:10 GMT -5 betahat said:

He was instructed to deliver some chinese sausage to her

Not even goin' there!

My parents met at B.U. (Same neighborhood, other side of the intellectual tracks). Both grad students, he played a trick on her to entertain a friend. It wasn't so funny when she cried. He felt so bad he married her. They had to get married in a backyard of a friend because of their color differences. Boston, those days...

[betahat]

^I think Boston is still a pretty racist city. At least, based on my brief trip there and also the experiences of an Ethiopian friend who has lived in Boston, in the South (Tennessee) and the Bay Area.

[admin]

The last news I heard on Boston was 1980 when my friend was trying to catch a cab from Logan to Cambridge. She found another student to split the cost of the ride, but the cab drivers wouldn't take them as a couple because he was black and she wasn't.

1980!

[Nikki]

Amazingly awful that that kind of stuff was still happening back then... and quite possibly still now :/

My parents met in the peace corps. In Hawaii.

Yep. Hippies.

[helles]

my mum was the receptionist who didnt know what she was doing, my dad was in senior management. my mum had to make long distance calls to the UK for my dad's boss, but she didn't know how, so she asked my dad to help her make the calls when he walked past reception.

my mum asked my dad out for a drink to say thanks for helping and that was it.

i need to be more like my mum (less of the ditzy and more of the asking guys out, tho maybe ditzy works too)

[jefe]

My mother left her Alabama town right after High School to work for the FBI in Washington, DC. A recruiter came to her High School, and she thought it was the perfect way to get away from home and strict parents who told her that she would have to go to either the University of Alabama or to Emory in Atlanta and marry a doctor. Her hometown made historical news in 1961 as the first town where the Freedom Riders bus was firebombed and the passengers were beaten with lead pipes for riding on the bus together.

My father's family moved to Washington, DC when he was a child, and operated a hand laundry in Georgetown, but lived near Capitol Hill. My father loved dancing, and hung out at the dance halls along Pennsylvania Ave., SE. My mother started going out there, and one day they danced together. I rack my brains about which song it must of been, maybe "At the Hop" by the Danny and the Juniors or "Twilight Time" by the Platters -- who knows? Or maybe something by Elvis Presley or the Everly Brothers? They told me that they used to watch Roberta Flack sing at O'Henry's before she catapulted into stardom.

I know they went to see the movie "The World of Suzie Wong" at some point before they were married. My father told me that he never found Chinese girls sexy, except for Nancy Kwan -- only later did I learn that she was actually Eurasian.

I remember many stories that my parents told me. One of them was when my parents showed up at a restaurant full of empty tables. They were told that they had all been reserved and that they would have to wait. After a long time, many patrons without reservations were seated, but they still not were not seated, being told that there were no tables for them. After a while, they left and ended up eating at a Chinese restaurant on Capitol Hill where my father used to hang out. I remember that restaurant, as my father still took me there in my early childhood.

When I saw the movie, "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" in 1993, I saw the scene re-enacted with uncanny similarity with the scenario that my parents painted for me years earlier. I thought that Seattle would have been much more progressive than Washington, DC.!

Jan 27, 2009 20:41:46 GMT -5 admin said:

The last news I heard on Boston was 1980 when my friend was trying to catch a cab from Logan to Cambridge. She found another student to split the cost of the ride, but the cab drivers wouldn't take them as a couple because he was black and she wasn't.

1980!

Yeah, I had started university by then -- Boston still had not gotten over the mandatory bussing in the 1970s, and there were still some nasty people out there.

But also, I remember that in my early childhood, we could not travel together as a family, esp. to my mother's home state of Alabama. How could my family stay in a hotel room together during the George Wallace era! And I do remember getting refused service in restaurants, or receiving extremely nasty service. Twice on separate occasions, my parents could not rent an apartment together, and they got around it by having my mother rent it first and having my father move in later.

People born after 1980 must think that this all took place many generations ago, some time around slavery.

[xandra]

I feel like I've told this story a million times!

My dad went to school in Rome, and my mom was there working. He befriended my mom's brother and they eventually met and well, the rest is history. Literally.

[palaver]

How do I say this.... They didn't really meet. It was arranged.

[bluegum]

They were hooked up by a mutual friend.

[growthbeyondreason]

My dad's sister was actually married to my mum's brother. So they were siblings-in-laws and they knew each other from a young age.
It's quite a romantic story really, but way too long.
Let's just say it involved an engagement ring thrown on the floor, my dad returning from the army and a failed elopement after a motorbike accident and matching scars to this day. Oooohhh...