Grace had tried EHarmony but determined that the site (and it’s inhabitants) was way too serious for her. After a few failed dates, she was ready to give up on dating until she caught a ride home on Metro from book club with her friend Tricia.
Tricia convinced her to try OK Cupid because, as she put it: “You’ve met (her now husband) Tom, and you like him right? I met him on OKCupid.”
From Flip’s perspective, it all started with OKCupid.com recommending that grace_o was a 91% match for some weird guy with the username ihavepantson. This led to him sending the following missive to his future wife...
Grace messaged Flip despite determining that his profile was TL;DR. As she points out...
I don’t remember many of the specifics from Flip’s profile but I liked that he didn’t seem to take dating or himself too seriously. He was into cars (but not too much!), and the Corvette was definitely a draw – although he drove the Subaru on our first date. It didn’t hurt that he was easy on the eyes and had a good sense of humor.
Flip immediately pounced on her message and tried to line up a date.
The first date was at the (now defunct) Salut Ristorante Italiano in Laurel, Maryland.
Grace remembers it like this:
Our first date was at Ristorante Salute in Laurel MD (Flip’s suggestion). We broke all the rules by talking about politics and religion during the course of our meal. Apparently our discussion was so heated that the ladies at the table next to us came over after our meal and told us that they agreed with us!The restaurant was BYOB so Flip volunteered to bring the wine. As people know, I know a little something about wine so I proceeded to tell him my two cents about what wine to bring. This didn’t seem to deter him since my first rule is never to buy wine with a cute animal on the label, because if you have to have a fancy or cute label, you are usually hiding something about the content of the wine bottle. He showed up at Salute with a bottle of wine with a cheetah on it. I was good though, and he didn’t seem to be turned off by my opinionated self so I let it slide. Turns out, he never read that email.
Flip remembers it like so:
I just remember that we wound up discussing religion, politics, and the finer points of the Rick Santorum campaign and Dan Savage’s hilarious redefinition of santorum, All I know is that I wound up asking her for a second date while we were still on our first date. Grace always gives me crap about how I like to make it sound like I demanded a second date, but hey, she’s entitled to her opinion even if she is completely wrong. :-)
As you can tell from their recollections, the food was delicious (as was the company) and the two of them agreed they needed to have a second date.
(It is possible that he was a more than a little attracted to her based on some of the correspondence unearthed later in their courtship...)
So you may be wondering, how did they wind up going from this epic first date to getting married? Well, Grace likes to say it’s the result of Flip’s “salesmanship” when trying to convince his friends to watch bad movies:
Flip’s friends know that he is famous for asking you over to watch a movie only to spend the first hour or so of your time with him watching anything but the movie.This is because Flip is the master of the random Internet clips and weird stories and via the phrase “just five more minute” you spend the whole night enjoying your time together, but never actually seeing the movie you came to see.This is also how he wound up wooing me – Just five more minutes, next thing I know, we are getting married. As Charles Barkley would say: Put that on a T-Shirt!