Why did you say yes?

D: Probably because I made such an enormous pest of myself.

M: He had just bothered me enough. I had to. At this point, we had had enough conversations running into each other at the department where, I liked him well enough and thought he was interesting enough to spend time with him, but I was not interested in him romantically. But he wouldn't leave me alone. We enjoyed each other's company when we went out. At some point though, I had to tell him that I just wanted to be friends. He was spending money on me, and I said, "Look, this is not going anywhere romantically. I really like you and enjoy spending time with you, but I have other boyfriends and I'm not interested."

When Mom said that, what went through your head?

D: It became a mission at that point.

M: He was very smart, actually, because he didn't push the romantic issue. He accepted the relationship completely on my terms. So we studied together, we hung out together during the week. He'd come over, we'd meet in the library. We started spending a lot of time together as friends and talking a lot. I felt like he was one of the few boys I could actually be myself with. I had other male friends at this point, a lot of them. But he seemed really interested. Let's face it: college-age boys, how often do you feel they're really listening? It's an age when everyone is me, me, me. Here was somebody who was genuinely interested in my thoughts and my feelings.

D: She went home for Thanksgiving, in November, and I broke into her apartment building and decorated her door with a big "Welcome Back!" sign.

M: Oh yeah! Aw.

D: It was stuff like that.

M: He wormed his way into my heart.

Wow, that's romantic, Mom.

M: He grew on me. I would go out with other people on the weekends, and I still had this long-distance relationship with the guy from Brooklyn, but over a period of months I became more attached to Dad than I was to anyone else. The guy I was dating in Boston, Adrian, was older, and one night I was having dinner with him. He was Irish.

Is this the guy with the bathtub in the kitchen?

M: No, that was Jimmy Sullivan! Who lived on Sullivan Street. I forgot about him. He was in there too, somehow.

D: I was never that concerned about the others, but Jimmy Sullivan gave me problems, because he was the only one who sounded enough like me to make me worry. He was the only serious rival. The others were just shmegegges.

M: So, I was having dinner with Adrian and I remember thinking to myself, "I don't really belong here." At the end of dinner, he wanted to go somewhere else.

D: Yeah, like his place.

M: No, no, no! Maybe a bar or something. But we didn't even finish the meal. I said, "I have an exam I need to study for, I really need to go." And I got up and left and I took a taxi to Dad's apartment, and told him that my feelings had changed.

D: She showed up at my apartment that night, and from that point we were a couple.

Dad, this girl was a lot of work. Before you met her, you were dating up a storm. What made you decide to change your entire lifestyle for this impossible girl?

D: Sometimes you come away from things with a conviction. You don't have to have a rational basis for it. I can tell you this much: even though I wondered about the amazing discontinuity of it all, I never really felt I had made the wrong choice.

Mom, did you feel like you got suckered into this?

M: No, I never felt like that. When we got together though, we were kids. I was twenty. We've gone through a lot together, some of it not so attractive. Over thirty-four years I've had my doubts, but we've also learned a lot about ourselves, we've grown, we've changed, we've compromised. Looking back on it, it was an unusual situation, because it really wasn't love at first sight for me. It was a love that grew from really getting to know somebody.

D: It was sort of a storybook romance, but it didn't involve storybook characters. You're talking about two pretty complex people and an overwhelming set of emotions and circumstances. We fight a lot, but we work it out.

M: I think it's a sign of a healthy relationship, because we don't always agree, but you have to learn things together over the years.

Dad, what if it hadn't worked out? Was there any option for failure?

D: Plan B was never in my mind. People say that life happens when your plans don't work out. Well, sometimes plans do work out. I committed to it, and I wasn't about to give up. I fought for her!

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."