First: 1976. Lived in an apartment one floor below me and a roommate. Saw her changing her engine oil in the parking lot when I came home from work and I was impressed - I'd never seen a girl willing to get her hands dirty to save a few bucks, and said so. A couple weeks later I came home from the lodge at the same time she & roomie came home and she invited me in for a tequila sunrise. I had no idea what that was, but a pretty girl was inviting me in and I wasn't going to turn that down. Married ten months later. Turned out that changing her engine oil was a one-time experiment and she had champagne taste on a beer budget. She thought it was okay if the house payment was late since the late fee didn't kick in for 10 days and it went downhill from there. She bailed when I refused to take out a loan for a trip six months after cleaning out meager savings for a trip to Disney World. That 5-year period was also the only time in my life that I have ever bounced a check, was late on a rent payment, was late on a house payment, received a telephone call about an overdue bill, and had to routinely "play the float" to make the house payment on time. Then she said I was "tense and irritable". Mea culpa.
Second: 1983. While talking with my niece, 5 years younger than me and just back from Texas after her divorce, commiserating about divorce and chasing credit card bills, she said there was a girl at work I should meet. At the time, being in the middle of a divorce, I wasn't interested in meeting anyone wearing a skirt. Lizzie kept bugging me about meeting this girl and more to placate her than anything else I agreed. Well, she was pretty and I figured life had to go on so 3 weeks later I took her out to dinner. She was a bookkeeper/accountant and can balance a checkbook so that was a plus. And the only time in her life she paid any credit card interest charges was when her car broke down, she was broke, and she had that paid off in three months. "Hmmm...."
After I bought a house by myself (hard to do in that area, impossible now for a single guy) I had every intention of being hard-core bachelor for life. I was "house poor" for years and often a "night on the town" consisted of a fire in the fireplace, a rented movie, spaghetti and maybe a bottle of wine if I'd worked some overtime. She came over one night, had a hole in her jeans, and said "Yeah, I know, but I hate shopping". "Hmmmm...."
Dated 4 years, both families had given up on us. Finally at work I decided it was time to fish or cut bait, made a U-turn, went back to the station, put in a leave slip, went over to her place and proposed. A wide-eyed second of silence, then "YES!" Will be 20 years next July. Damn, she's still real cute.