JoJo is getting Married!

Five years ago, in April of 2017 I was scheduled for a training at my company’s corporate office that I could not have been less excited to attend. The topic was going to be profoundly boring, I had just begun to recover from Gonzaga’s tragic loss in the national championship game, as well as horrific food poisoning the week before. None the less I arrived for the first day of training and decided to get some coffee to help make everything more bearable. I noticed a girl sitting quietly at a table in the back of the room; and for the next two days I would catch glimpses of her and referred to her as the cute girl with curly hair and glasses. Fast forward to July when one of my treatment team members was going on maternity leave and I was introduced to the temp who would be filling in for the next six months. She looked quite familiar, and although I am usually very good at remembering faces, it took me several days to realize it was the cute girl with curly hair and glasses. I learned her name is Jocelyn and we spent the next five months meeting once a week for our treatment team meetings. Those of you who know Jocelyn might be surprised to learn she uttered not a word to me for five months. During our meetings she would offer only a little smile and say “mhmm hmm” to anything I asked her. Shortly before Christmas we began to make the smallest of talk there ever was, about, you guessed it, traveling. I went to visit my family for Christmas, wished her a Merry Christmas before I left, and when I returned, learned her time as a temp had ended and I would probably never see her again. Thanks for the heads up, Jocelyn. But life goes on, and after all, we had only spoken more than a few sentences to each other maybe twice. But I could not help but feel bummbed I did not get to say goodbye. A few months later, Jocelyn was offered a full-time position at Cordilleras, and I was obviously excited for her to return. She had been gone only a few months and would be familiar with the clients and staff etc, which is what I told everyone to compensate for my overly excited reaction to the news. Over the course of the next year, I engaged in the most juvenile and feeble attempts at flirting with her. Subtly positioning myself where she would have to walk past me during morning report; so I had an excuse to say good morning to her. Over thinking what I was going to wear each morning so I looked presentable, and also hoping our color schemes matched so I could jokingly say we matched when I saw her…over thinking the colors so as not to repeat the same ones too frequently thus decreasing our chances of matching. Slowly, very slowly, Jocelyn and I became friends rather than just coworkers. Though neither of us had admitted anything to each other, we would orchestrate after work happy hours as an excuse to spend time together. These interactions continued into the fall of 2019, when after months of us both subtly hinting at actually liking each other, nothing had happened. Jocelyn’s friends had to get involved and finally, at Jocelyn’s Halloween party, I had an epiphany, and was able to admit to myself that I had really strong feelings for her. Staying on brand with the past two years of our time together, we (I) danced around making our relationship official. However, once that finally happened, we have basically been inseparable. Our relationship became official just a few days before the whole world shut down due to the pandemic, so we had many months to get to know each other even better, and watch a lot of TV. I could not imagine spending the last few years with anyone else, and I know we both look back fondly on the early days of our relationship reminiscing about eating subway and spicy ramen while watching silly cartoons on a near daily basis. Now we talk about feeling a mixture of excitement and disbelief knowing we get to do that for the rest of our lives juntos.