Fifteen Years Ago

Fifteen years ago today, on December 12, 2006, my husband V and I met for the first time when he walked through the door of my office at the Voice of America in Washington, DC where we both worked.

He came to my office in response to an email I’d sent and we got to chatting about the fact that he was from Macedonia, where I had previously served as a Peace Corps Volunteer. (He had immigrated to the United States almost four years before I’d started my service, so we knew some people in common but had not known of nor met each other.)

I wrote my DC cell phone number on a Post-it note; he still has the note, and I still have the number. We started officially dating a couple of weeks later, after I returned from visiting my family in California for Christmas.

I don’t have any pictures of us together from December 2006 or January 2007; the collage below shows the oldest pictures I have of us from February to December of 2007. We look so young in the photos now that it kind of makes me laugh.

We moved in together at the end of 2007 and got engaged in 2009. We moved from DC to Virginia in 2009 and our wedding was in 2013 in San Francisco. We joined the Foreign Service in 2014.

It has been an epic journey so far, as those who know us can attest! I’m looking forward to many more years of health and love together in the future.

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