In the beginning...

Short version:
Christa and I met in the library at BYU. She sat down next to me while I was studying for the LSAT, I failed to get her phone number, and then I 'stalked' her.

(Lest that sound creepy, the actual definition of stalking is 'to pursue or observe someone persistently out of obsession or derangement.' To the best of my knowledge, I was neither obsessed nor deranged.)

Longer (stalking?) version:
The day we met, my roomate Gavin studied beside me in the library. When he had to go to another part of the library, he said he wasn't going to leave his stuff there because some beautiful girl was going to come and sit down next to me. Gavin and I have known each other our entire lives (born in the same hospital, same month, to families that were already friends), and we joke around with each other like this all the time.

Ten minutes later, a beautiful girl (Christa) came and sat down next to me. I looked around for Gavin, thinking he had asked some random girl to take the empty seat. No Gavin. So after a few minutes we started talking. I don't remember what we talked about, but I walked away very impressed with the cool girl I had just met. Yet without her phone number, all I knew was her name was Krista and she came from Connecticut.

Of course, once Gavin found out a beautiful girl did end up sitting next to me and I did not ask for her phone number, he and my other roomates decided to never let me hear the end of this. "She was the one and you blew it. You're now doomed to wander the earth alone", etc.

So I decided to try and find her. Looking on the student directory, there was no Krista from CT and only one Christa. But I was not about to call up a girl out of the blue and ask if she was the girl I sat next to in the library the other day. Yup... that would be psycho.

But after continued brutal encouragement from my roomates, I agreed to find out if the Christa in the directory was the same one from the library. The online directory showed that Christa lived on Condo Row, a street right next to campus. [For those not familiar with BYU, college students go to church on Sundays with a congregation called a 'ward' whose boundaries are based on geographical proximity. In order to help all the students get to know each other better, most wards keep a directory of everyone's picture, called the ward directory]. My plan was to drive to Condo Row, knock on a random door, ask to see the ward directory, and look for the Christa from CT's picture. If it wasn't the same girl, I could ride away into the sunset without any kind of akward conversation.

Jeremy (another roomate) and I drove over and walked up to the first apartment building. We asked a girl leaving the building if she happened to have a ward directory, she invited us in, gave us the directory, chatted for a few minutes, and then told us to close the door when we left. 'Wait! Don't you have to lock the door?' 'No, I trust you guys.' Then she went to class. I know, I know...only in Provo.

So there we stood in this random girl's apartment, looking through the directory, when I found the Christa from CT....and it was the same Christa from the library! "Jeremy, it's her!" "Sweet. Write down her number." Then I looked at the address...and we were standing in her apartment! The girl that let us in was Christa's roomate!! "No man, we've got to get out of here." Throwing down the directory, we raced out of the apartment. Just imagine how psycho it would have been had Christa suddenly returned home and there we stood inside her house.

To make a long story a little bit shorter, I tried to pull the plug on this search that had gone way past the line of propriety into the realm of psychotic behavior. But my roomates persisted. So we called up Gwen, an old friend of ours that lived in Christa's ward (I had seen her picture in Christa's directory), and had her make the first contact with Christa. Gwen asked Christa if she could give Christa's number to a guy named Rob who thought he had met her in the library. Christa agreed.

And the rest is history.