It begins.

The Crunchy Marriage was once the crunchy dating couple And before that, we were once two semi-adults about to drop out of our institutions of higher learning. Back then, who could have foreseen that New York Nikki would have picked up what Muscatine (that's in Iowa) Mark was putting down?

It began with two blogs.

Mark cyber-stalked Nikki for over a month before posting on her blog. Under the guise of wanting to find out about her alma mater, as a possible transfer, he approached undetected. "I'm like.... in love with her brain!", he told his friends. Which was cute.

Kind of a floosy, Nikki was dating a few guys at that point, but thought Mark's blog seemed interesting and liked that he was kind of always showing up in her Xanga's (remember Xanga?) foot prints. It all began with a blog.

And here they are... back to their roots.

After a month or so of emailing, which turned into calling, which turned into late night weepy phone calls, they decided to meet. Except that he was in Oklahoma, and she was in New York. Mark, who had a huge map of the US on his wall, did an approximate and determined, aha! Lexington, KY is the exactly middle between their two cities.

Traveling 716 miles each, they met in a Starbucks after discovering not much else existed in Lexington. Six hours later they finally left the Starbucks. Six weeks after that they were engaged.

Four years later, we find ourselves at the beginning of an interesting story. What began with making popcorn in a pot just to see if we could, has become a level of engagedness with all that we consume that neither of us could have participated.

Our city-dwelling crunchiness still suprises us, but we've learned a lot, and we're excited to be a part of the blog-o-sphere, in dialogue with you.