First Impressions

According to psychology, it takes .1 seconds to make a first impression on someone.  I recently learned I am one of those people who could be referred to as "prejudiced".  I judge people entirely on the first impressions they leave on me.  It's bad, I know.  And I wonder what effect admitting this will have on your impression of me. Let me see if I can take you past your first impression of me and tell you a little about myself.  I'm a 19-year old student studying communications.  I recently (as in 8 days ago) got married to a man who I'm convinced is the most perfect person I've ever met.

Aren't we just so cute? Especially him!

And the crazy part about that? Our first impressions of each other were horrible.  Well, maybe not horrible.  But definitely not good.  Let me share the story of how we met (trust me, every married couple LOVES telling the story of how they met).
It was my first day of college.  I was in a new town, I knew exactly 3 people in the surrounding area and they were not even in any of my classes at all.  I was a deer in the headlights, trying to seem like the interesting new girl while at the same time appearing as if college was nothing new and I wasn't absolutely terrified.  I made it through my first class and confidently strutted into my second class, Intro to Philosophy.  This class was basically a big group therapy session- the professor assigned us to groups and we were given certain philosophers to discuss.  My group always just had "therapy time" until the professor came around and we pretended to be talking about Kent or Plato or whoever the dead guy was.  Anyway, on the first day, we had to do the necessary ice breakers.  We were given the question "what is your personal philosophy" and not wanting to seem super shallow or stuck in the middle school phase of "shopping fixes everything," I said the first and only thing that came to my mind: Hakuna Matata. Needless to say, I got weird looks.  Especially from the guy I concluded was a frat jerk who just partied and didn't care about anyone else.  Oh, first impressions.

Fast forward to a few weeks later, and the people in my group had become a sort of family to me.  There was me, the girl I originally thought was an attention whore and turned into my best friend, two potheads (who actually were potheads, at least I was right about two people!) the guy I originally had a crush on but who I soon realized was only acceptable until he opened his mouth, and the frat jerk who I now affectionately call "husband".

How did our minds about each other change? Simple. We actually got to know each other. While Blake's original thought of me was that I was immature and still stuck in my childhood, he soon realized that while I am stuck in my childhood (I think I maxed out at growing up to be 5 forever) that made me fun, with a sort of childlike innocence.  And I found out that the guy who just seemed to want to party actually just liked having fun- which includes binge watching Boston Legal while eating oreos.

The first night we hung out, after we had started to break out of our shells, we had a real, deep conversation.  We had been hanging out with a group of people at his frat house, and we went off to the store by ourselves to buy pie. (Always up for adventures; him!) That night, we talked about our families, our goals, and to top it all off, he bought me cookie dough.

When I got home that night, I tweeted "he bought me cookie dough <3 he's a keeper!"

Yeah, I called it from the beginning.  But not what I thought was the beginning- the actual beginning.  The beginning where we both put aside our prejudices and actually got to know someone before permanently deciding how to judge them.