The Swenson Chronicles: The Rest of the Story...

Sarah texted me yesterday while I was at work and said, “So, I know you’re going to hate me for asking…” I had to wait in suspense for the next text to know what I was going to hate. She asked me to write “our how we met/started dating story” without looking at her version—I cheated; I read hers.

I got home from my mission in June of 2007. Two months later I moved back down to Provo to go to BYU. I did one year at BYU before my mission and lived in the dorms. All of us that were in the dorms together left on our missions within a few months of each other and were all getting home around the same time. A bunch of us had some apartments reserved so that we could all live together at the Riv. When I went to sign my contract, the Riv had already given several of my group’s reserved rooms to other people. I—as well as several other guys—ended up having to find an apartment elsewhere. The apartment that I was supposed to be in was directly across from Sarah's apartment, but even though I had to find another place to live it all worked out in the end.

I had been in my apartment for about a week just working when several of the other dorm guys started moving in to the apartment that we were all supposed to be in. I left work early to go meet up with the other guys since we hadn't seen each other for over two years. One of the guys, Lee, had served in Spain and was showing me a really old Spanish Hymnbook that he had gotten on his mission. We walked out of the bedroom singing one of the Spanish hymns. (At this point it’s important to note that in many missions missionaries joke that the more adversity a missionary faces—getting spit on, hit with rocks, etc—and the more he tracts in the rain, the hotter his future wife will be. You get “wife points.”) Lee and I walked out and *BAM* there was Sarah and all of those days knocking in the rain and racking up wife points paid off ;-)

5 ½ weeks later we were engaged. 12 weeks after that we were married. In all it was 4 months and 1 day from the day we met that we were sealed in the Portland temple. During those 4 months the only days that we weren’t together were between Sarah driving home for Christmas and me getting there with my family to get ready or the wedding. We spent a lot of time together. We got trapped in the sprinklers trying to have a bonfire up the canyon. Sarah smacked another girl in the head with a racquetball the first time I took her to play. Her Bishop caught us kissing in Sarah’s apartment when he walked out of the building across the street and had a straight view into her kitchen; he then called her over on Sunday to ask her about me. We walked A LOT—I used to walk to the nursing home where Sarah worked to pick her up from her shift and walk her home. We often stopped at Denny’s or The Olive Garden to eat while walking back from the nursing home. Sarah got in an accident and smashed in the front of our car while she was in Oregon for Christmas. She called me while I was on the road with my family crying that she’d crashed our car and was so worried that I would be mad at her—it was a crappy car in the first place; I paid more for her ring than we ultimately were able to sell that car for (not that we didn’t appreciate the car. It was wonderful to have until we could afford something better…). We met, had our first kiss, and got engaged at the Riviera apartments. Everyone thought—and some told us—that we were crazy.