So Grandmother tried to break you guys up.

M: My father asked him how he planned to support me. And he answered honestly, that I was going to drop out of college and support him until he finished. And my parents hit the roof. I'd been raised with the best of everything. My father told him, "No daughter of mine is going to work." So my mother took action.

D: I could tell she liked me personally. She just didn't want me anywhere near her daughter.

M: Her intentions were good. She was very loving, but she was smart and willful and oversaw everything. Even though things were in my dad's name, she actually ran the family business. She told me I'd never gone without, that I didn't know what it was like to be poor, and that I was romanticizing it. She had a point. We lived in a Victorian mansion at the time, and the former maid's quarters were now an attic. There was no heat. She made me sleep in it for a month. To test my resolve and see if she could break it. Which only made me more determined.

But Grandmother went further than that, right?

D: Yes. Then your grandmother called me at work, and said she wanted to take me to dinner when my shift was done. I knew something was up, but I didn't know what. So I met her there, and she had this really nice purse. She pulled out a paper bag and told me it contained six-thousand dollars in cash. She told me to take it and never see her daughter again.

What'd you do?

D: I told her to make it twenty thousand and we'd have a deal. No, I'm kidding. I got so mad. I told her how much I loved your mother and that I didn't want a cent of her family's money. But she showed me the cash, to make sure I got a good look at it.

Mom, what'd you do when you found out about this?

M: I didn't know for about two weeks. Your father thought I already knew, but told me when he realized I didn't. I was furious with her. We had a huge argument. And she kept telling me to calm down, that it was going to be okay, but that I couldn't marry him. I asked, "How is it going to okay? I love him." I cried for weeks and at this point, she was honestly scared I was going to run away. So she said I could keep seeing him, but she forbade me to tell anyone.

D: We almost eloped.

Hold it. What? You would've killed me if I'd done that.

M: I know. But we were starting to think we might not have a choice. We met with my mom's sister, who'd been divorced. She was the most modern one in the family, and she said she'd help us. But then I decided we weren't going to run away, because that'd be like admitting guilt, and we weren't doing anything wrong. I wasn't going to hide anything.

D: My parents had an arranged marriage. Her parents had an arranged marriage. Getting married used to be like applying for a job.

M: But we actually met and fell in love and courted — it wasn't dating, really, because we were chaperoned most of the time — and we chose to be together. Nobody on either side of the family had done this yet.

D: And I didn't come to the United States to get married. I came to make money and send it back to my family in Greece. So my family was mad the money was going to stay with your mother and me.

You guys pissed everybody off. How long did you date before Dad proposed?

M: A little over two months. Which seems amazing now. It was such a crapshoot. I was eighteen. How did I know?

D: You can be eighty and still not know.

M: We were at a fancy restaurant and an older couple in the next booth was listening the whole time. Your father told me to think about my answer carefully, because if I said yes, then changed my mind, he'd throw himself off the Aurora Bridge.

D: It didn't have guardrails in those days. It wouldn't have been too hard. [laughs]

Mom, what did your parents say when you told them?

M: My mother laughed at the suicide part. She said, "You dummy. They all say that." My father asked me why I wanted to marry him and I said, "He makes me laugh." He said, "So does a clown, but you don't marry him."

D: I understood why they were doing all this, though. And soon your grandmother and I became close friends. Because my mother had died when I was so little, she became like a mother to me.

M: When your father and I would get in arguments, my mom would take his side.

D: She and I would play pinochle together.

M: So Litsa, when you were in college and thought I was the strictest, meanest mom ever, I was actually quite liberal in comparison.

Is the story of how your parents met or the adventures of their wild youth the stuff of family legend? Are you interested in sitting down with them and getting the full story? If so, we'd love to hear about it! Send us a brief description of your parents and the story you'd get from them to submissions@nerve.com with the subject line “Before You Were Born."