Teachers give love advice

His first date: “I took a young lady to a dance at Shawnee Mission North and I had known her before but she was really a daughter of a friend of my folks and before she was kinda shy and had braces on but when I picked her up her braces were off and she was gorgeous. I mean I fell madly in love with her I just went “wow” when she came around the corner in her yellow dress I can still see her so that was a very special first date. Unfortunately she didn’t respond the same way I did she just liked me. But ya know it was pretty memorable.”

Love advice to high schoolers: “Don’t. Fall in love. Do not fall in love. It’s too stressful, just say high school romances are doomed. The only chance you have is if you go to a different school cause you don’t see each other all the time and then you can maybe maintain it. So I would wait and just have nice, light-hearted friendships. The love thing, wait until you can handle it so maybe about 25? That’s what I tell them, don’t fall in love. Now if you have already, I’m so sorry, hope you’re okay.”

What her husband would say about their relationship: “Um he would say that I’m crazy. And that we try to have as much fun as we possibly can because life is long and hard.”

Most memorable part of her wedding: “The only thing I wanted to do on our wedding was have fun. We have pictures, like I was on a table and I was dancing on the table and they picked up the table too and like pushed it up and so it was pretty fun and I was like sweaty I was dripping sweat. It was so great. It was just really fun. Like it was nice, I liked our flower arrangements and we had a really nice cake and like the place was really cool and the food was great and all of that was important but I just wanted to enjoy it ya know. I think some people work so hard on weddings but then they don’t have fun right I just wanted to have fun and we had a pretty good time.”

His first crush: “If you would’ve asked me when I was in elementary school I would have told you that I was going to marry this particular person and they actually at the time probably would’ve said the same thing. It was kind of a cute little deal. … It was a really small school, everybody knew everybody. I liked the fact that, you know, on the playground she seemed to be into sports. She was a good basketball player and she was actually a national champion in the what used to be called the Elks Hoop shoot, it was a free throw contest. Other than that it’s all the same stuff we always like about people.”

Worst love advice ever received: The worst dating advice I have ever received has probably been given to me a dozen times. Anything that encourages a person to be something they’re not, is terrible advice. To “play the game”, or to “play hard to get”, or anything that paints an inaccurate picture of oneself. What is the point? I’ve never wanted to do that. I just wanted to find the person that lets me be me, to let me love them and care for them, and to share a relationship that is as easy as it’s supposed to be.

How she met her husband: “So nerdy but I actually always sort of knew him at KU we were kinda friends. People would tell me that they thought he was cute and I was his friend and I started setting him up on dates all the time cause I didn’t want him to know that I thought he was cute. But we started dating when he was the president of his fraternity and I was the president of my sorority. So we started doing all of this leadership stuff and something called president forum and that’s when we started dating.”

First crush as a kid: “I just was not, like, into boys. I’m trying to remember a date. Also even in college people would be like ‘how was the date?’ I’d be like ‘it wasn’t a date.’ I was always in denial about anything. Except the girl I lived with my sophomore year, when Matt would call, would always write ‘your husband called’ and it would just completely make me mad. I always said ‘what is wrong with you?’ and she still, of course, reminds me of that. I was just really weird about it.”

Photos by Julia Percy