This is either a love story or a cautionary tale

The Crouch Chronicles: Part 1

I have wanted to write about the story of Christian and me for a long time. Years ago I began to write it all down, but at the time we’d only been married a few years. It’s coming up on 16 years now, and while I’m sure there are many more exhilarating tales that others have told, as I have begun to reconstruct the timeline of our relationship, I have been struck once again at how unlikely it was for the two of us to find each other. Apart from the work of a sovereign God, it never would have happened. And yet it did, almost as if each of us were magnets that for the first 20 years of our life were too far away from the other for there to be any pull. And then, in 2006, they were each nudged just close enough together for the pairing to be unavoidable, and, once together, very difficult to pull apart.

Once we met and talked about our future together, I don’t remember any reservations. We didn’t break up or put our relationship on pause. Even when Christian traveled to another continent a year into our dating relationship, we stayed together. For two long years as we waited to graduate from college so we could live closer to each other, and then for another year until we got married, we were side by side moving toward a future together that we were committed to until one of us died. We’re still there today, by the grace of God.

A picture taken some time when we were dating.

I want to chronicle our story partly because I think at least some parts of it are entertaining. The beginning years are a time capsule of sorts, because technology and the entire world have changed so much. But it’s also for myself, and for our kids, so that our family history will not be lost to time. I’m already surprised at how much I’ve forgotten, and I want to start writing before my memory fails even more.

I have no idea how many parts this is going to break down into. Even if I just write one post for each year of marriage, that’s 16. So I’m just going to start writing and stop at points that make sense, and we’ll go from there. I also don’t know how often these pieces will come out, because I have to go digging through very old photos and journals and Facebook posts and while it is actually really fun to do that, it’s also time intensive and there are six people who live in my house, including myself, and they require a good bit of tending.

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"Hey, I Like Your Xanga" | The Crouch Chronicles—Part 1

This part covers from Fall 2005-April 2006.

Elizabeth¹ and I had first connected at a party at her apartment. We had an overlap in our friend groups; both of us were involved in different campus ministries at the University of South Carolina, but there were some people who went to both. Some way or another, I was in her apartment.

And when I say party, let me clarify what kind of party I’m talking about. There was no alcohol that I remember. This was a bunch of church kids. We played Guesstures together and ate grilled chicken and macaroni and cheese. Elizabeth and I were making small talk when I mentioned that I had just finished a book about Reformed theology. When I told her the title, she said she had just read the same book. It was as if the famous C.S. Lewis quote on friendship had incarnated:

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."²

No one else I knew was interested in or cared about Reformed theology, and Elizabeth felt the same way. We were instantly kindred spirits.

It was the fall of 2005. We were in our sophomore year of college. My freshman year had been a bit of a rollercoaster. It started with a traumatic injury to my eye and ended with an on-again off-again romance with a guy I met in one of my classes. We had continued dating, kind of, through the summer, but by the time we got back to school, it was over. Thankfully, though, I had found an amazing group of friends, and I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend.

Elizabeth and I would spend hours talking about our newfound interest. We read blogs and books and played devil’s advocate with each other on the finer points of Reformed theology. At some point during that school year, we decided that it made the most sense for us to each start a blog where we could write about Reformed theology. Surely everyone would be interested in the opinions of two 19-year-olds!

We each created our blogs on Xanga.com (which no longer exists in that form, sadly). At one point, the college pastor at Elizabeth’s church left a comment on one of our blogs challenging our thoughts. How dare he! I actually went to meet with him in his office at one of the largest churches in Columbia to tell him how wrong he was.

How I feel about the fact that I confronted an experienced pastor 20 years my senior over a topic that I had been learning about for four seconds.

Anyway, back then, there wasn’t any social media except Facebook for college students, but Xanga had a feature where you could add your blog to a group. We added our blogs to the “Xanga Calvinists” group, of course, where we found tens of other 19-year-olds who also thought they knew everything about a theology that dated back 500 years. I actually started talking with a guy in Mississippi who was in seminary who was part of the group. We even talked on the phone.

That fizzled out, which was fine, because it honestly seemed a bit weird to have a boyfriend who you met online through a “Xanga Calvinists blog group” (future humans will have no idea what this even means).

One day, Elizabeth got a comment on her blog by a guy who was in the Xanga Calvinists group. Since neither one of us were getting much engagement on our blogs, any comment on either of our blogs was noteworthy, so I decided to go check out this guy’s blog.

I began reading backwards through his blog, months and months of posts. He was also 19 and seemed to know everything about Reformed theology. He was into music and played the guitar. He was funny. I began to comment on some of his posts, and, as he also didn’t have many comments to moderate, he began to read and comment on my blog.

I don’t think my blog really had a title, but I had the lines to a hymn as the header.

In holy contemplation
We sweetly then pursue
The theme of God’s salvation,
And find it ever new;
Set free from present sorrow,
We cheerfully can say—
Let the unknown tomorrow
Bring with it what it may.³

The hymn was written by William Cowper hundreds of years earlier, but it had been set to new music by a band called Indelible Grace.⁴

Unbeknownst to me, this guy was also a fan of Indelible Grace and had recognized the lyrics. After continuing to comment back and forth on each other’s blogs, we took the next big step of talking to each other on AOL Instant Messenger.

In case you’re not sure what that is, it’s basically just messaging someone on your computer. It’s texting, but without a phone. I know it doesn’t sound like anything novel but way back in 2006 there was nothing like it. There was no way to send direct messages through Xanga. I had had an AIM profile since high school and so did this guy, so we shared our usernames and began to have hours-long chatting sessions from our respective dorm rooms—him in Tennessee and me in South Carolina.

We added each other as friends on Facebook on March 10. Here’s the first thing I wrote on his Facebook wall:

And here is the first thing he wrote on mine:

Here’s another example of something Christian put on Facebook:

And here is an example of how I commented on his old Facebook pictures.

There are more that I could share, but for the sake of ourselves, I won’t. I will, however, share a few more pictures that both of us thought were worth sharing on Facebook back in 2005-2006. (Christian is the one in the rainbow clown wig.) If you are much younger than I am, keep in mind that one could not text pictures at this point in history. Putting them online was the only way to share them. And, in 2006, only college students could use Facebook.

Less than a week after we really started talking online, Christian went on a mission trip to Florida for his spring break. This meant we could not communicate during this time because texting was expensive back then and he wasn’t taking his laptop to use AIM. However, my birthday happened while he was gone. Somehow he managed to find a way to get on Facebook (an Internet cafe? I have no idea) and he wrote the following:

In case you don’t speak German, Herzlichen Glueckwunsch zum Geburtstag is German for “Happy birthday,” but it was the mein Fraeulein after it that really set me off. It essentially means “my lady” or “my girl.”

Oh, how my roommates and I dissected that line. What did it mean? It seemed like a term of endearment but he was a pretty goofy guy, so maybe it didn’t mean anything? But he had used the word my like I belonged to him. I was dying the whole time he was gone. What if he forgot about me on his weeklong trip?

My friends and I out for my birthday that year, before we began to analyze that Facebook comment to death.

I decided that in order to pass the time while he was gone, I would write him a letter. It was basically as if I lived in Victorian England—I wrote down every single thing I did. It begins:

Dear Christian,

I am currently sitting in my favorite Barnes & Noble in Columbia drinking a mocha frappuccino. I just finished work for the day, but I have an appointment for a follow-up on my wisdom teeth at 2 so I am killing some time.

Don’t worry, the first paragraph of his letter to me was MUCH worse.

The envelope my very first letter was in. These addresses were to our school mailboxes.

I continued in the letter to explain my job, which involved behavioral therapy with an autistic pre-schooler. I then told him about my closest friends (all in the picture above). I apologized for ending many sentences with prepositions. I asked about his friends. I said that “my mom told me that I am the most intense person she has ever met” and that “I have also been told by more than one person that I am really intimidating.” (The fact that I wrote these in the middle of a 20-page letter did not seem to strike me as confirmation of this.)

I continued working on this letter for several days, so the following day (I marked on the letter when the new day began), I told him how the wisdom teeth appointment went. I wrote out a C.S. Lewis quote. I told him about a recent panic attack. (And on and on and on. Honestly, I got bored re-reading my own letter.)

Yes, there were 10 pages front and back.

Thankfully, when Christian got back and read my letter, he still wanted to talk to me. I hadn’t had a serious relationship since my boyfriend from the previous summer, which had mostly been at train wreck. But this guy seemed legit. He also had had one rough romance his freshman year. Neither of us were looking for love, but we really liked talking to each other.

For the first time in my life and really never again since then, I decided to take the initiative. If this guy was for real, I liked him. If he was a fraud, then I wanted to know so I could stop wasting my time. And so I proposed that I come to visit him, in Tennessee, at his college.

Before I did this, though, I did some due diligence. I wasn’t completely love-struck. I discovered that he had a mutual friend—Katherine—on Facebook with my friend Elizabeth. This mutual friend also went to USC with us. I sent her a message and asked how she knew Christian. She said Christian was good friends with a guy named Robert, who was dating a girl named Lindsey, who she had gone to school with in Charlotte. Katherine had met Christian and confirmed he was an actual person.

Katherine also told me that she was going to be going up to Tennessee to see a concert with Christian and their other friends on March 30. I don’t remember if Christian knew I had talked to Katherine at this point, but I decided to make some brownies and write a note and send them with her to give to him.

This was the front of the note I sent with the brownies. If you will notice, the tulip on the front is the same as on the letter I wrote him. I don’t know what I was trying to do there.

His response to this was positive, so this gave me the confidence to propose my trip to visit him, and it also gave me a place to stay because he was able to ask Lindsey to help me find a spare couch in one of the girls’ dorms.

We set the date for a weekend in April, less than a month after we had started talking. I had just turned 20, and Christian was 19. I was on pins and needles the whole week leading up to the trip. I was going to drive six hours to meet someone in person that I had only communicated with over the Internet. We had never even talked on the phone!

Before the weekend came, though, I got a package in the mail from him. It included his own handwritten letter to me as well as two CDs he had burned.

I still have the ACTUAL physical CDs.

He also included a list of the songs he had put on each CD.

As I was taking the picture of the song titles, I realized for the first time that Christian apparently didn’t own scissors. It appears he just ripped a piece of paper in order to create two pieces of paper approximately the size of CD liner notes. I did not notice this at the time and thought this was one of the most meaningful things anyone had ever done for me.

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I went ahead and recreated each of these CDs on Spotify—they’re all killer, no filler if you want to listen.

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His letter to me was only seven pages front and back, but it was full of as much mundane information as mine.

Here’s how his letter began:

Dear Chelsey,

I will immediately apologize for my terrible handwriting. I’m tempted to blame it on my particular variety of genitalia, but I always thought that playing the “boy card” was a lame excuse.

I read the letter at least a hundred times. He ended it slightly better than he began the letter:

I am on pins and needles waiting for you to come in. I’ve never been more nervous—or excited—about anything before in my life. Whatever God has planned for us, I know that this will be one of the best weekends of my life. You’ve blessed me more than you know, Chelsey, and the faster you get here on Thursday, the better! So hurry up! Drive fast! Drive safe! and call me when you get close. [his number redacted]

A few days later, it was time to drive to Tennessee. In order to get there, I had to print out several pages of directions from Mapquest and keep them on the passenger seat of my car.

I wrote this on his Facebook wall the morning before I left. (I don’t know why I referred to him as “SC.” Some of our inside jokes still remain, but some have been lost to time.)

The drive from Columbia to Sewanee was about six hours. As I was driving through Chattanooga, I called Christian. I was about 45 minutes away and was planning to let him know my established ETA. Guys, this was the first time we had ever spoken on the phone. We had never heard each other’s voices. He said later that it was when he heard my voice that it hit him that this was real and I was really coming to visit him and this might go somewhere. He said it also occurred to him that this might become a romantic relationship, which I was very much aware of and had been for weeks. (Must have been his genitalia that also led him to be clueless about this.)

The drive as you get close to Sewanee is beautiful. To this day, I don’t get tired of it. You drive on a long, steep, highway up a mountain that rewards you with incredible views on every side. The exit off of I-24 that takes you to Sewanee is your typical interstate exit, but once you get close to the university, it honestly feels like you’ve entered another realm.

I drove down the main road of the small campus and followed the directions to the German House, where Christian lived with several other students who were also majoring in German. I parked in the small gravel parking lot, my insides bubbling up with excitement and nerves.

1. I have changed the names of some people as I write, especially if we aren’t in contact any longer.

2. From The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis

3. The name of the original poem is “Joy and Peace in Believing” (https://poets.org/poem/olney-hymns-xlviii-joy-and-peace-believing)

4. This version is sung by Derek Webb, who had been a member of the band Caedmon’s Call, one of my favorite bands.