The epic tale of Dan and Kristin
A couple of years ago, I wrote this piece in response to a lit mag’s call for love stories. People who’ve known Dan and me for the past 25 years know parts or most of this tale. But the question “So, how did you and Dan meet?” is something I’ve had to answer a lot over the past 10 years as we’ve built our Baltimore circle of friends. It always feels a little… I don’t know … self-centered? obnoxious? cringe? to tell this story. But people seem to really like it.
The article didn’t make the cut for the lit mag, but I like it. So, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I’m sharing it here.
The call came in around 10 p.m. I assumed it was a family emergency—after all, who’d call at 10 on a Friday night if it weren’t important? But it wasn’t my mom, dad, or sister. The name on the screen was Dan Hanson’s.
“Dan?” I asked, emphasizing the question mark. I wondered if I’d dozed off on the couch while watching TV and this was, in fact, a dream. Although we’d been communicating nearly non-stop for months, we’d yet to actually talk on the phone.
“Hi,” he said, and I could hear an uncharacteristic tension in his voice. “You got a minute? I need a favor.”
“Sure,” I answered, wondering what kind of favor I could provide from a couch in Burlington, North Carolina, to a person doing … something … in Arlington, Virginia.
“What is passive voice?”
I knew the answer but paused a beat, trying to figure out why he’d need to know what passive voice was late on a Friday night in June. So I asked.
“I’m writing this proposal, and the edits from my boss all say ‘too much passive voice,’ and I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” he answered.
“Ok, ok,” I replied. “Can you send me over what you have so I can see what you mean?”
I got up off the couch, walking a dozen or steps to grab my laptop from the kitchen table. Returning to the couch, I spent the next half hour of my life teaching Dan one of the finer points of my writing and editing trade: the “by zombies” rule.
“If you can put ‘by zombies’ after the verb in your sentence, and it makes sense, you probably have passive voice,” I explained.
“Seriously?” he laughed in return.
“Yep, seriously,” I said. We went through the first few pages of his draft applying the rule until he got the hang of it.
“Thank you so, so much,” he said, sounding much calmer than he had at first. “I’m sorry to do this to you on a Friday night, but I didn’t know who else to ask about this.”
I blushed at his comment, feeling instantly grateful he couldn’t see my face. It took a lot for me to bite back the words, “For you? Anything.”
“Sure thing,” I answered, as coolly as I could muster. “I’m glad I could help.”
After we said good night, I closed my laptop and returned it to the kitchen table. But I couldn’t get out of my head the strain I heard in his voice when the call began. I knew his consulting job was stressful, but the desperation in his tone sounded unhealthy. When I sat back down on the couch, I reached over, grabbed phone, selected “Recent Calls,” and touched Dan’s name at the top of the list.
“Hey, what are you doing in three weeks?” I asked as soon as he picked up.
“Nothing…” he said, then paused for several seconds. “Why?”
“Because you need a break, and I don’t trust you to do it yourself. I’ll come up there and we can do whatever you want, even if it’s just sitting on the couch watching movies. Got it?”
He didn’t answer right away. My stomach churned, and I wondered if I’d gone too far.
“OK. That sounds good,” he finally spoke.
“OK, I exhaled, hoping my voice didn’t betray my relief. “You think about what you want to do that weekend and I’ll plan to come up that Friday.”
We said good night again, and I put the phone back on the table. I was thrilled we had plans, and I couldn’t wait to see him. But I also knew it might be the last time I saw him, because I had an ultimatum to give.
At the time of that phone call, Dan and I had known each other for nearly 11 years. I met him in the first class of my first year at Elon University, at the time a small-ish and relatively unknown college in central North Carolina. That day, we learned we had two things in common: We were each from the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area, and we each wanted to become sports broadcasters. (Fun fact: Neither of us became a sports broadcaster.)
I don’t remember the exact moment I saw Dan as more than just “that guy in my class,” but it was early in our college career. We never had a shortage of things to talk about, especially with our sports teams being regional rivals. He would always smile when he saw me and say, “Hey beautiful” – and I loved it despite the fact he said the same thing to all the girls on campus he knew well.
That spring, I invited Dan to my first sorority formal. Even though we had a great time together, it was apparent that, at that point, friendship was about as far as our relationship would go. He was a good-looking guy in a popular fraternity at a southern college where the girls-to-guys ratio was weighted in his favor. I was a slightly overweight, extremely underconfident girl still trying to figure herself out.
Because Dan and I were in the same small cohort of what Elon called “Communications Fellows,” our academic paths crossed often even if our social routes didn’t intersect much. When we did spend time together outside of class, though, we always enjoyed each other’s company. At one of my sorority’s formals that each of us attended with different dates, we spent most of the night sitting together on the venue’s rooftop terrace, talking and laughing for hours. My date didn’t care too much, but at the next day’s chapter meeting, the sister who’d invited Dan gave me an earful: “If you and Dan had a thing, why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you take him to formal?”
Even our teachers could tell something was up.
“Are you and Dan an item?” Dr. Copeland asked me one day in a meeting in his office during my senior year. We’d taken the same section of Dr. Copeland’s media history course a year earlier and, as Communications Fellows, enrolled in his Senior Seminar course together. In short, Dr. Copeland had seen a lot of Dan and me.
“No,” I said, entirely too quickly. I tried and failed to stop my cheeks from growing bright pink. “Just good friends.”
“Oh,” Dr. Copeland said, leaning back in his chair with a peaceful, knowing expression on his face. “Well, I bet you two’ll end up together, somehow.”
I shrugged, hoping he was right but certain he was wrong. And, save for one night when Dan came to a party at my apartment and ended up crashing on my couch, I was right. By the time we both graduated in May 2005, I’d made my peace with the status quo.
“We’re friends, and I’m grateful for that,” I said at a party on graduation night to Pamela, one of my sorority sisters and best friends at the time. Pamela, never one to suffer bullshit, shook her head.
“Crushes never die, Kristin,” she replied and took a long sip of her drink but kept her eyes on me the whole time. I knew she was right.
Over the next five years, thanks to the vast powers of Facebook, I stayed in touch with Dan despite living in different states. Our interactions centered mainly on birthday greetings and trash talk whenever our baseball or football teams played one another. My first job after graduate school, however, set Dan and me on an in-person collision course. I returned to Elon as the alumni communications coordinator. A short while later, Dan and a number of my undergraduate friends joined the university’s Young Alumni Council. Those roles meant Dan and I would see each other at least twice a year.
Six years beyond our Elon graduation, we each were in long-term relationships. I’d been dating a guy I met in Milwaukee during my two summers interning at the newspaper there — a transformative period during which I finally shed my awkwardness, lost some extra pounds, and found confidence in myself. My boyfriend, Curtis, had moved to North Carolina for our relationship, and it seemed certain we’d get married sometime soon. As far as I knew, Dan was in a happily committed relationship with a woman in Washington, D.C., who shared his love for government and politics.
After one Saturday meeting of the Young Alumni Council, I brought Curt to meet Dan and some other friends at a local bar. As I watched the two of them chat, I could hear Pamela’s words in my mind: “Crushes never die, Kristin.” Maybe they don’t, I thought to myself, but maybe it’s possible to outgrow them.
“He’s nice,” Curt said of Dan on our ride home to our apartment. He knew all about my history with Dan because I’m awful at keeping secrets. I knew he didn’t adore the fact that my college crush had assumed a guest-starring role in our life.
“He is,” I replied, “but you have nothing to worry about.” In that moment, that was the truth.
Less than a year later, things were quite different. I began hitting a professional ceiling at Elon. I felt like Curt really wanted to go back to Wisconsin, but I wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted at that point. That became a point of contention between us.
In early March, I spent a weekend away with friends in Florida for a bachelorette party. It was the first time I’d felt like I was “Kristin, period,” rather than one half of a couple in God knows how long, and I liked that feeling. When I returned to North Carolina, I knew what I had to do: end things with Curt.
Although I instigated the breakup, I struggled a lot with my decision. Because we’d dated for more than four years, just about all of my friends were also Curt’s friends. It was hard to talk through how I was feeling without making them feel like the rope in the middle of our tug-of-war. But there was one person I thought might get what I was going through: Dan Hanson.
A few months earlier, I’d learned he and his long-term girlfriend had broken up. I didn’t know the what-and-why of the situation, but I imagined he had to navigate the same choppy post-relationship waters I’d just entered and may have some advice. Better still: he didn’t have a connection to Curt he would worry about compromising if he were my confidante.
That’s how the path to the “passive voice” phone call months later began. In that time, we exchanged hundreds, maybe thousands, of G-Chats and texts; at first supportive then increasingly flirtatious. We spent time together during two Young Alumni Council weekends—one featured our first kiss in the very romantic setting of the Best Western Burlington parking lot after a late-night run for Cook-Out milkshakes and hush puppies. In mid-May, I drove up to Virginia ostensibly to watch baseball and see some friends — but really, I wanted to see Dan.
“So …” asked my best friend, Jenn, when I returned from the Virginia voyage. I didn’t know how to answer her. I’d tried to keep things with Dan light and at arm’s length given our history. I didn’t want to allow my hope for a relationship beyond friendship to hurt me like it had in college. But I also couldn’t deny I’d fallen in love with him in spite of that fear. The only way to see if he felt the same way, or if this crush needed to die a dramatic death, would be to ask him, point-blank. The late June plans we’d made after the “passive voice” phone call presented a prime chance to pop the question.
That weekend opened with a bang — literally. At around 8:30 p.m., I deftly parallel-parked my car on Vermont Avenue right in front of Mio, the restaurant Dan and some colleagues were visiting for an excessively extended happy hour. Less than a half hour later, one of the most violent storms in D.C.’s history blew through. The 2012 derecho knocked out power for days to large swaths of the D.C. metro area, including Dan’s neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. With no air conditioning in his house and absurdly hot weather on tap, we decamped on Saturday morning for Dan’s friend Dave’s house in Annapolis, Maryland for cooler air and a night of bayside bar hopping.
All that night, I struggled to stay present and enjoy my time with Dan, drinking and laughing and dancing and kissing. But the question I planned to ask the following day kept pushing itself to the front of my mind. Finally, somewhere around midnight, the alcohol dulled my willpower so much I couldn’t hold the question back any longer. Dan and I sat on the top level of a multi-story bar, the pulsating house music giving us a bit of sonic privacy from those around us. We sat on a bench, and as Dan put his arm around my shoulders, I leaned my head on his. After a minute, I spoke.
“So tomorrow, before I leave, I need you to do something for me,” I said. I sat back up and checked his expression to make sure he could hear what I was saying over the noise. He looked back at me and nodded. “I need a yes or no answer tomorrow. ‘Yes,’ we’re together, like…dating. Or ‘no,’ we’re not. But I don’t want to hear ‘maybe.’
“We can be together if it’s ‘yes,’ or we can be friends if it’s ‘no.’ I can deal with ‘no.’ But I can’t live with ‘maybe.’ We’ve always been ‘maybe.’ I’m tired of ‘maybe.’ I need a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’”
He nodded again but didn’t reply.
“You don’t have to tell me now, but you have to tell me tomorrow, OK?” I asked, my anxiety beginning to clench my throat. Before he could answer, our friend, Dave, rushed up to us.
“We’ve gotta get out of here,” he panted. “People are taking their clothes off downstairs. We just gotta go.”
Confused, we followed Dave down the stairs to the third floor where, sure enough, people were dancing in bras and boxers and various levels of undress. The bizarre scene had all of us gasping with laughter as we stumbled down the stairs toward the bar’s exit and into the humid Annapolis air. But it also changed the subject, and Dan never acknowledged whether he’d heard my question.
The following afternoon, we pulled into the driveway of Dan’s house in Arlington. He popped his trunk, and I took out my weekend bag and slung it over my shoulder.
“You remember the question I asked you last night?” I said, returning to the topic for the first time since we fled the bar-turned-strip club. He took his sunglasses off and perched them in a tuft of his thick blonde hair. I left my sunglasses on.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“So, what is it? Yes or no?”
I steeled myself for the disappointment of a “no” but resolved to keep my word and remain friends if that were the case. But the longer he stayed quiet, his face betraying supreme discomfort, I felt anger start flushing my neck.
“Kristin I –”
With two words, I already knew what was coming. The heat of the anger reached my ears, clogging them to the point I almost couldn’t hear the rest of his sentence.
“—I just don’t know. Right now, I don’t know. OK? I just –”
“No,” I snapped, grateful I decided to keep my sunglasses on so he couldn’t see the hot tears springing out of my eyes. He tried to say something, but I didn’t listen to it.
“Goodbye, Dan.”
Then I turned and walked to my car. There was no hug, no goodbye kiss, nothing. I opened the door, threw in my bag, got in, and slammed the door shut. He didn’t try to stop me.
I cried until I reached Richmond about two hours later. In that time my phone buzzed at least a dozen times, as Dan kept calling and texting me, saying he was sorry and asking if I was OK. I shut the phone off; I had nothing left to say. My decade-plus crush on Dan Hanson was officially dead.
Four days later, after more than 100 ignored phone calls, texts, and G-chats, Dan decided to try a new avenue: email. Could he call me that night? He had something he wanted to say, and it wouldn’t take long.
Realizing that he’d probably never stop until he had a chance to say his piece, I gave in. I tersely responded that I was going to dinner with friends, would be back at 10 p.m., and would be asleep at 10:30 p.m. If he wanted to talk, he could call in that window.
My phone rang at about 10 o’clock and four seconds.
“Hey,” he said.
“Well?” I answered, half a weeks’ worth of frustration flowing from word.
“You were right,” he said. “I want to give this — us — a shot.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t.
“You there?” he asked after about 30 seconds of silence.
“Yeah,” I finally spoke. “So, is that a ‘yes,’ then?”
“Yes.”
My jaw finally loosened, allowing a smile no one could see break across my face.
“OK. But I’m going to need you to come down here and tell me that in person,” I said.
“That’s fair,” he answered. I could hear in his voice he was smiling, too.
On a Friday afternoon two weeks later, I walked across Elon’s campus on my way between meetings. As I passed by the communications building, I ran into Dr. Copeland — my and Dan’s teacher from years ago and now a friend. We shared a hello and some pleasantries over a few minutes. Before we parted, I said, “Do you remember how you said there must be something with me and Dan way back when we were in your Senior Sem?”
“Of course,” he said.
“You were right,” I replied, unable to keep from grinning at the words. He returned the gesture.
“See! I told ya. Good for you guys,” he said. “Tell him I said hello.”
“Will do,” I said, turning to walk back to my office, my car, and my apartment, where Dan would be arriving in just a couple of hours.