Love and Blogging

97 Comments / Personal

Peter Pan should have been a cosmologist. I mean, if you want to stay forever young, nothing puts things in perspective like contemplating our place in a fourteen-billion-year-old universe. You tend to take a long view of things.

But eventually, one must grow up and start acting like an adult. Did you realize, for example, that many grownups participate in an institution known as “marriage,” which apparently involves tying your entire future history (and let’s be clear about this — I fully expect to be immortal) to that of another person? Someone, obviously, who you better like an awful lot. And who better be able to put up with you. Trust me, you really don’t want to interact with me before I’ve had my coffee in the morning.

How in the world is one expected to find such a person, in a world full of interesting but flawed characters? Well, there’s always the blogosphere. Two kindred spirits, tapping away at their matching MacBook Pros, could find each other across thousands of miles in a way that was heretofore impossible.

All of which, in a fumbling and hopefully-charming way, is to say that it’s happened. I’ve fallen hopelessly for the beautiful and talented Jennifer Ouellette, science writer extraordinaire and proprietess of Cocktail Party Physics. I first plugged her blog (completely innocently! honestly!) back in March, and we met in person at an APS meeting, of all places. Best conference ever.

And, various cross-country jaunts and countless emails later, we’re engaged to be married. If it’s clear that you’ve found the perfect person with whom you want nothing more than to spend the rest of your life, you might was well get the presents, right?

Expressions of astonishment that I could have done so well by myself, and wonderings aloud concerning what in the world Jennifer must be thinking, may be left in the comment section. You needn’t tell me how fortunate I am — I know.

Related Posts:

97 Comments

97 thoughts on “Love and Blogging”

  5. Fermi-Walker Public Transport

    Congratulations to you both.
    The total happiness of the world just went up a bit which is always most welcomed.

  7. Pingback: Blogs, ciencia y amor « La Singularidad Desnuda

  9. Sean

    Thanks to everybody for the congratulations! To answer some implicit and explicit questions:

    1. We will be sharing the bag of plagues.

    2. Secret blog crushes on one or both parties are still permitted.

    3. Everyone is invited to the wedding! Which will be live-blogged from start to finish, including by the bride and groom!

    Okay, that last point isn’t true. But perhaps there will be a picture or two.

  11. spyder

    Sharing the coveting of plagues seems about as good a reason as any to get married i suppose. Congratulations for the Solomonic wisdom. And while i personally am not one keen on the whole state-sanctioning of licensing contractual arrangements for the private lives of two individuals, i simply must ask about the location dilemma. I have to say i like what my own ex-wife #4 (hence my reticence to the institution at this point) chose to do with her recent state of matrimony. When i asked if she was packing up and moving, she said “Hell no!” The two of them, quite happily married after years of courtship and relating (he had the charm and sophistication to ask me if he could actually go out with her in the beginning [i couldn’t have cared less]), live in their own private homes fifty miles from one another. They seem to be very happy, and my children and grandchildren report good tiding. So are you bi-coastaling for a while???

  13. Jennifer Ouellette

    Okay, I can field the last two comments. First, Ix-nay on the Big Church Wedding, as regular CV readers no doubt expected. 🙂 It will be a decidedly non-deity-invoking ceremony.

    Second, we’ve been doing the bicoastal thing, and it works pretty well, in the short-term. We’re communucators! 🙂 That certainly helps. And I know several couples with “long-distance” relationships who have been very happy that way. But long-term, I’d really prefer to be in the same city/household as Sean. I LIKE Sean and enjoy spending time with him. (If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have agreed to marry him.) Ergo, I’ll be relocating to Los Angeles in the next several months.

    We’re fortunate in that we don’t have to struggle with the infamous “two body” problem: I’m self-employed and work from home, so it’s far easier for me to relocate, since I can do most of my work from anywhere. So, even though it’s a major change, and I might have to do some negotiating here and there, it’s not a major sacrifice, career-wise.

    Besides, there’s that bag of plagues to consider… who wouldn’t move across the country for that?

  14. Belizean

    Congratulations!

    With yet another science blogger moving to California, it looks like the golden state is rapidly becoming the center of the science-blog universe.

  18. Matt

    Congratulations to you both. You managed to find each other at the April APS meeting despite the frighteningly large number of teenage volleyball players there at the time 😉 !

  24. Arun

    Congratulations to the two of you, and best wishes!

    —-

    Q: how does one Fourier transform the double-valued function that is the outline of a breaking wave?

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top