Lauren Greenwood babbled on her first date with Jonathan Krieger. Yet, they somehow averted a potential disaster, as nerves sent outgoing Greenwood and quiet Krieger to their extremes.
After dinner at The Cheesecake Factory, Krieger walked Greenwood to her parents’ door. They shared an awkward end-of-date peck. But, the intense and long hug that followed is what she vividly recalls.
“I had never been hugged this way by someone on a first date,” says Greenwood, 22, who works as a nanny, “but the hug said to me, ‘I want to take care of you and protect you, and you are special to me.’ ”
Krieger, 25, a firefighter in Franktown, says he wasn’t trying that hard, but concedes, “I think it was just a subconscious thing – that I did care for her.”
Despite proximity since preschool, the lifelong Coloradans became friends while sharing summer 2002 as lifeguards at a community pool. Two years later, they visited a mutual friend, and Krieger saw Greenwood in a whole new light. “I don’t know what it was,” he admits.
That shift set everything in motion – date, hug, future.
One year later, he proposed. A year after that, on June 16, 2006, they married at the Boettcher Mansion. Greenwood always had loved the historic home on Lookout Mountain in Golden.
“When we got engaged,” she says, “we booked it. We didn’t even look anywhere else.”
Freelance journalist Roxanne Hawn welcomes suggestions for future Vows columns, denverpostvows@wispertel.net.
