A few years ago, Julie and Nate Alfers met and married thanks to a mutual friend, Steven Cram. He jokes that, ever since, they have owed him a wife.
The Alfers settled that debt in early November 2004 by introducing Cram to Lindsay Morehouse. The connection was instant.
Meet. Morehouse knew the minute she saw Cram walk into the Alfers’ home that she’d marry him. “I just knew,” she explains. “It was one of those moments. I had never felt or thought that could happen. I don’t know. My brain kind of just said a lot of things at once like, ‘Wow! He’s great. He’s the one,’ and it just proved itself that night.”
Cram was more cautious, especially after being stood up for three of five Internet dates. But he felt an unrelenting urge to talk with her all night. And, that’s what he did in the car, at dinner, throughout a concert at Herman’s Hideaway. “For all the activity going on around us, it was just us on two bar stools, in our own little world,” says Cram.
Match. Their first kiss came later that night. The romance became exclusive immediately because both preferred dating one person at a time.
Morehouse turned out to be everything Cram wanted. His grandmother and an aunt soon agreed, even noting the similarities between Morehouse and Cram’s mother. “I was like, ‘Yup, she’s the one,”‘ he says.
While Morehouse didn’t have a definitive list in her mind about her future mate, she wanted a really nice person who would pay genuine attention to her. “Like listen to me when I was talking. He was just riveted by everything I had to say,” she says with a giggle. “I’m fascinating.”
Cram says his listening skills are a plus. “It’s easy when I’m one of those guys who likes football, but doesn’t have to watch it all the time,” he says. “That seems to work with the ladies.”
Marry. On the first day of summer 2005, Cram proposed to Morehouse at Cheesman Park. Other park visitors saw no indication of the big moment because rather than screams of joy, Morehouse wept silently.
Morehouse also cried from the moment she walked into her intimate wedding at the Hotel Monaco and well into post-nuptial picture taking in the wine cellar nearby. Cram, who teaches empathy to middle-school students, didn’t fuss. He simply handed her a handkerchief following the exchange of vows and hugged her tightly. During the ceremony, the Rev. Michael Woods told them: “In this quiet hour, you now appear to solemnize in marriage publicly the covenant you have already made in your hearts.”
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