How Did Your Parents Meet?

Stories from college, Paris, and among the oranges.

By Kate Sibery

Illustrations by Nini Vilac

For a long time I told the story as follows: my parents met at a Halloween party in college, my mom was dressed as a farmer in denim overalls and my dad wasn’t dressed up as anything because that is just typical of him. It has since been clarified that my parents knew of each other before then because their respective roommates—Jen and Brady, who are married to this day—were dating. I realize there are many elements of this story that aren’t unique: college, a party, overlapping social circles, probably even Halloween. 

When someone asks me how my parents met it is usually the result of proper social etiquette. That is to say, usually someone has asked me how my parents met because I asked them the same thing first. It’s a genre of story I never get sick of hearing. 

Many people’s parents meet in college or at a party at some point in their twenties. I have a friend whose parents met at a supermarket in California (yes, like the Ginsberg poem, though Garcia Lorca and Walt Whitman were nowhere to be found). I believe they were standing by the oranges. Another friend’s parents met in a bar in New York, her mom was reading the same Don DeLillo novel that her dad had been carrying around to thumb during idle moments on the subway or in the park. 

Of all the stories my friends have told me, those that stand out are always characterized by an element of unbelievable coincidence, bordering on absurdity. They make me want to start using the word cosmos—a word that always struck me as overindulgent, like saying “The stars aligned.” 

My friend Fiona’s parents met, or rather met and then found each other again, in this cosmic way. 

Their initial meeting wasn’t particularly remarkable: they went to the same high school in Manhattan, dated briefly, and then broke up after graduation. A few years later, Fiona’s mom was on a plane to Paris for her semester abroad and ended up sitting next to a girl who was looking for a roommate to share the apartment her family had rented for her. Naturally, Fiona’s mom said yes. 

While getting ready to go out one night, Fiona’s mom was sifting through her roommate’s closet and picked out a t-shirt with a picture of a model on the front. She recognized him as the guy she had dated in high school and so her roommate insisted that she take the shirt home, where she ended up packing it away in a box and forgetting about it. 

A few more years passed until one night, Fiona’s mom walked into a bar in Manhattan and ordered a drink from a bartender who looked exactly like a guy she had dated in high school and had seen on the front of a white t-shirt in Paris. From behind the bar, Fiona’s dad was struck by how similar this woman looked to his high school girlfriend. It took only a few minutes of talking for them to figure out that they had in fact dated many years before, that Fiona’s dad had done a brief stint in modeling for Calvin Klein, and that they were both living in New York again, studying architecture. 

I ask the question, “How did your parents meet?” with the hope but never the expectation of hearing a story like this one. The story of Fiona’s parents is undeniably a great one—unbelievable and yet believable enough in all of the right ways. Cosmos. There’s an element of unbelievability in all of the stories I’ve heard though, in the precise chain of events that my friends and I have each traced, from a supermarket or a bar or a Halloween party (because that’s the story I’m sticking with) to ourselves, sharing these stories.