Lance and Michelle:
Who We Really Are

The pre-history

Lance was born in Atlanta in 1973, three months after Michelle was born on an Air Force base in Michigan. Her family moved frequently with her father's job until settling in Franklin, Tennessee in the middle of Michelle's eighth grade year. Lance's family moved less often, going first to Ohio and then to Philadelphia before settling back in Atlanta as Lance was starting the eighth grade.

In eighth grade, Lance became friends with Marc Moskowitz, and stayed in touch with him during high school after Marc switched to another school. Michelle, meanwhile, met Allen Petersen and Rebecca Pratt, who had grown up together in Franklin.

In 1991, Lance went off to Rhode Island to attend Brown. Michelle and her friends scattered: her to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois; Allen, to Haverford in Pennsylvania; and Becca, to Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota. Meanwhile, Lance's girlfriend Christie also went to Carleton, as did Marc.

Christie and Becca became good friends, and Marc and Becca bagen dating. Allen would soon meet Deborah Kaplan, a native of the Boston area.

The first meeting

In the summer of 1992, Lance was asked to take time off from Brown while he reevaluated his interest in higher education (and Christie received a similar suggestion from Carleton). For the Fourth of July, Marc decided to visit Becca in Tennessee, Christie thought it would be fun to go with him, and Lance decided he'd like to meet all these people (and he had a car).

So the three of them drove up with a bag of pork rinds, where they spent the weekend with Becca, Allen, another Carletonian named David, and Michelle.

This was where Lance and Michelle first met. He was more concerned with his girlfriend and his "what am I going to do now?" status to notice much more about Michelle than "huh, she's kind of cute." Michelle found Lance impossibly arrogant.

It was during this weekend that David suggested to Lance that he move to Minnesota and get an apartment with Christie. It seemed like a good idea.

Later meetings

As William Goldman wrote in The Princess Bride: "What with one thing and another, four years passed." Lance and Michelle met a few more times when Michelle visited Carleton to see Becca. Christie and Lance parted on shaky but good terms, Marc and Becca and Deborah and Allen graduated (or, in Allen's case, wandered away) from college, moved to Boston, and got an apartment together. (Meanwhile, Lance and Deborah had met over a mailing list they both happened to be on. Ask Deborah, she'll tell you the story.)

They met up again at Marc and Becca's wedding in the early summer 1996, where Lance was single but Michelle was dating a friend in Franklin, where she returned after college. David suggested to Lance that he return to Brown. It seemed like a good idea.

By the fall of 1996, Lance was back at Brown, and he and Michelle were meeting occasionally as she came up to Boston to visit "The Freaks," as the Marc-Becca-Deborah-Allen household was affectionately known. He had become less arrogant, but she had become less single, so there was friendship between them but nothing more.

The relationship

In August of 1999, Lance drove a U-Haul with his furniture from Atlanta to Franklin, loaded it with Michelle's furniture, and sat back to read Bridge of Birds to her while she drove them both to Boston, where they were moving: her to get out of Tennessee, him to start graduate school at MIT for his Ph.D. in linguistics. With the pressure of seven years of growing affection behind them (as well as the start of a shared set of injokes, beginning with "Can we go to Cape Cod?" "No."), they began dating a few weeks later.

They stayed together for four years through the usual rise and fall of good times and bad times, until November 2, 2003, when Lance asked Michelle to "test" a set of seven puzzles, entitled Relationships are Stupid. Michelle bravely soldiered through the puzzles while Lance paced nervously, and four hours later Michelle reached the end and the final question of the set of puzzles. She didn't quite believe she was reading it right, so Lance read it to her: "Michelle Dunnewind, will you marry me?" Her answer, "You're such a dork," was taken as a yes, and they began the rest of their lives together.