Why I Love Fall: A Confusing Love Story

I love fall for a lot of reasons: cooler temperatures, Starbucks's Salted Caramel Mocha Latte, beautiful colored leaves, and the anticipation of the holiday season. But mostly, I love fall because it is the season that I fell in love.

Ten years ago this November, I headed over to my new friend's apartment to cook dinner on a cool Tuesday night. He was a shaggy, poor graduate student named BJ who I thought was cute in a stray-dog kind of way. If you know me, you know that all of these descriptors add up to my kind of guy.

We cooked skillet lasagna out of his red-and-white-checkered Betty Crocker cookbook. It made such a huge batch that we divided the leftovers into Ziploc bags and froze them. I later learned that it took BJ a very, very long time to eat it all.

After dishes were done, we sat down on his roommate, Josh's, futon, a Native-American motifed number that could only be seen in the apartments of bachelors. While chatting, I casually dropped that my hands were cold. BJ chivalrously offered to hold them in an attempt to warm them up.

While sitting holding hands, BJ said he had something to tell me: "Kalyn, I like you a lot. I mean I really like you." I said, "I like you a lot, too. Like I really, really like you."

We were really, really articulate.

Being only a few months shy of twenty and having never had a boyfriend, I was eager to put the appropriate labels on the situation to avoid confusion, so I asked if holding hands and saying we liked each other meant we were dating. My shaggy, commitment-phobe crush said he wasn't prepared to call it dating yet. Instead, we were "seeing each other." I was officially confused.

For the next few days, I found myself fielding several questions from friends and family about my relationship status (this was long ago before one could just put "It's complicated" on Facebook.) Being inexperienced in the romance department, I did my best to clarify that we were only seeing each other. I was pretty sure we were dating, but I figured it was best to be prudent and wait for BJ to figure it out at his own pace.

Five days later while making out, BJ admitted that, yes, we probably were dating.

And ten years, an engagement, a wedding, multiple cross-country moves, and three children later, I'm really happy I went over to BJ's apartment to make heaps of skillet lasagna.