Erin Napier Shares Her Love Story With Husband Ben: ‘I Loved Him Before I Even Knew Him’
By Movieguide® Contributor
Erin Napier shared the sweet story behind how she met and fell in love with her husband Ben in a series of Instagram posts.
The photos Erin posted are all of notes from Ben from the past year, adorably signed “Big.”
“On December 7, 2004, I woke up in my dorm and went to class like any other Tuesday. In a yearbook meeting, it had been decided by the staff that we would write 10 articles for the book on the most interesting people on campus. The first choice was unanimously Ben Napier, and as design editor, I said ‘I can be there for the photoshoot if I need to be. It’s no big deal.’”
Erin shared that she had had a crush on Ben since the 10th grade and was constantly keeping her eye on him because she “wanted so badly to be his friend.”
“He made anyone he spoke to feel like they were special, he sat with the person eating alone. And because of that, I loved him before I even knew him,” Erin gushed.
The pair met at the yearbook office, where Ben immediately hugged her, requesting a “two arm” hug.
“For the first time I noticed how very big he was—6 feet 6 inches and nearly 300 pounds,” she wrote. “I felt as small as a bird. I could smell the laundry detergent he used, his cologne, and I melted. 6 days later we decided we would get married.”
She continued the story in another post, writing about how Ben asked her to get dinner with him and his friends the day they met. That night, he also texted her to offer to check the brakes on her car — during their conversation earlier that day, Erin had mentioned they were acting up.
After doing the photo shoot, Erin conducted the interview with Ben and at one point, she “knew” he was going to kiss her.
“Then he stopped,” she wrote. “He grinned and said ‘you were gonna let me kiss you.’ I denied it obviously, because you can’t fall in love and kiss someone 12 hours after meeting them can you? He leaned back in his chair and we finished the interview and he said ‘I’m going to change clothes then let’s go for a drive.’”
The pair drove “for hours,” listening to music and talked about their lives, their families, and their past relationships. After he dropped her back off at her dorm, Ben called her, and the pair “whispered until 4 am.”
The next day, Ben invited her to a club with him and his friends. Erin “tested” him by saying she needed to go to her parents’ house and pick up something for class.
He went with her and quickly hit it off with her mother.
“I decided that if mama liked him, he must be really good,” Erin said. “I agreed to go with him to the club.”
She went, but when a guy she was also seeing at the time showed up, she left to go sit with him.
“I knew it was right to stay and talk with Charlie for the rest of the night, but I left my heart when I walked away from the table with Ben,” she remembered. At the end of the night, Ben gave her a ride home.
“I felt bad for leaving Charlie standing there, but…I chose to come there with Ben, and I would choose to go back with him,” she explained. Ben drove the rest of his friends home, but stopped to get a soda with Erin before taking her home.
While the pair sat in his car, Ben asked, “Would it be alright if I kissed you?”
“Even after he’d said the words, I wasn’t sure it was real,” Erin recalled. “I said, ‘You can’t ask something like that! You have to just do it.’….A few blocks away, we were getting close to campus when he stopped at a 4-way intersection and leaned toward me. He kissed me.”
Erin broke things off with Charlie, and she and Ben were inseparable for the next few days.
“In the driveway of his decrepit old gray house, he told me ‘I think I’m falling in love with you.’ I said ‘I think I’m falling in love with you too,’” Erin shared. “Of all the many girls he dated before me he’d never been in love. He told me he was going to marry me one day. I said I’d like that very much.”
She captioned early photos of the couple: “These are pictures of us after knowing each other for 12 days before saying goodbye for a month of Christmas break, a week before I applied to Ole Miss and canceled my future at Savannah College of Art because wherever he went, I would go too.”
Ben and Erin got married in 2008 and have been together ever since. The couple share two daughters, Helen, 5, and Mae, 1.
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