The night Texas Woman and IT Guy met

I’m a cougar. So’s my sister. I’m 62. She’s 66. (Sorry, Sis.) Our husbands are 50 and 54, respectively.

We were just happily married women until some goofball decided that from that day forward older women married to or dating significantly younger men would be named after the sleek predator cat. Both our marriages pre-date the term by many, many years.

How Sis and I both ended up with men who just happen to be twelve years younger is not something that’s at the forefront of our minds, just like the fact both men are computer guys. Coincidences, merely.

But since you asked, I’ll tell you how IT Guy and I met.

Almost twenty years ago we both traveled to Austin from two different and distant towns to dance at a certain Texas dance hall. We met through lack of chairs and two-stepped for most of the evening.

“I want to see you again,” he said late in the night.

“It’s dark in here, and I’m older than I look,” I replied.

“I’m balder than I look,” he said, and I realized I hadn’t seen him without his cowboy hat.

“How bald?” I asked.

“How old?” he inquired.

I took my driver’s license out of my back pocket and handed it to him. He quickly calculated the age difference. As he handed the laminated piece of paper back, he doffed his cowboy hat, bent his head forward, and showed me his baldness.

“Let’s dance,” he said, sticking his hat back on his head.

When IT Guy tells the story, he always adds, “And we’ve been dancin’ ever since!”