Journey to Married to a Baller, Part Two

Dating

September 2001

Our first date was on a Tuesday in October of 2000. I don’t think Joe or I knew what to expect, and some of the time was spent feeling one another out a bit. After we got some ice cream at Meyer Dairy, we were still talking, so we went back to my apartment where we ended up talking until around 2am. That pattern of talking until late night hours continued the rest of the week, until it was time for me to head out on a road trip for soccer. At the time, Joe was also in preseason for basketball, so we weren’t the most well-rested people. But anyone who knows what it is like to be in the early stages of love knows that you can just run on adrenaline. He wrote me a letter for that first road trip and I remember reading it over and over again. I still have it in a scrapbook too.

The next week we continued spending lots of time together, but then some fear set in. Both of us were wondering what in the world we were doing. We barely knew each other and yet we were spending time together like we were married. We both had our moments of questioning if we were crazy. Since we had both been in long term, on-and-off again relationships, there was a hesitation to rush into things too quickly. I was still leery with him being a star athlete because I had seen him play. He was rather confident and I kept wondering if he was going to be as reckless off the court as he could be on the court.

This was a completely different relationship than I had ever been in before: Joe loved Jesus more than me, he wanted to talk about what we were reading in the Bible and we prayed together every night. So early on, we discussed if this was something we wanted to be serious about, because if not we felt it would be a waste of time. So within the first couple weeks, the marriage discussion came up. From that point forward, we were pretty committed to seeing this dating through until marriage.

Then reality set in. Joe and I were (and still are) very opinionated and strong personalities, so we started butting heads early on. God granted grace to work through these issues, but we still made many mistakes along the way. One of the toughest things for me to come to deal with was being the girlfriend of a basketball player. I hadn’t looked ahead to think about what it was really going to mean to be dating Joe during his senior year when his team was doing very well and everyone knew who he was. We couldn’t go anywhere without people talking to him. We had to sit around and talk to tons of people after his games. We were always the last to leave the arena as the lights were being shut off, while walking out with some group of people who wanted to talk to him. I didn’t mind so much the attention he got as I did the pressure it put on me to be social. I wasn’t one who was good at small talk. And I especially didn’t like to be looked at. I was very insecure and always felt like people were staring at me wondering why in the world Joe Crispin was dating me.

So a couple of months in, I decided I had had enough. After a night out of continuous small talk, I told him I thought I was not the girl for him. I just didn’t feel cut out for this life style and knew he was going to be in the spotlight for many years to come. He looked me straight in the eyes and asked what I was saying. I told him I thought we should break up. He just laughed and said, “Well, I’m not going to let you break up with me.”

Thankfully he didn’t, but now the end of his senior year was coming to a close. Agents started calling after the season and talk of him playing professionally picked up. I always knew that was what Joe wanted to do, but now it was becoming more of a reality. I still had another year left in school and he was going to go off and play professional basketball somewhere. What was going to become of us?

Read on in Part Three: The Engagement