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We’ve been here before. It was when The New York Times published their off-base piece on How To Be A Modern Man. It made me want to barf.
But here we are again with the most fluffy, bizarre, and flat-out weird marriage announcement I’ve ever read. Let’s just get into how much I hate it.
As always, original column in quotes.
She Went to a College for a Job, and Found a Husband, Too
Just the title in itself is insufferable. It’s as if no one has ever gone to college and found a husband before until Hannah Eddy.
If there is a punctuation mark that reflects Hannah Eddy’s personality, it is the exclamation point. She is tall, thin, vivacious and perpetually positive.
And if her husband was a letter of the alphabet, he’d be “O” because that’s the shape of the engagement ring that she went to college to find.
Ms. Eddy, 27, who grew up in Eugene, Ore., with five sisters and brothers, was known as the old soul among them. “She is very traditional in some senses,” said Jordan Eddy, one of her brothers. “She loves going on fancy dates. She loves it when the gentleman opens the door for her.”
If liking “fancy dates” makes you an old soul, then that makes my friends’ girlfriends the characters of the 1868 novel Little Women. Liking expensive shit doesn’t make you an old soul, it just makes you hoity-toity.
She is not on Facebook or any other social media sites. Instead, she keeps in touch with friends by mailing them funny, artistic greeting cards with handwritten messages that are generally full of exclamation points. “If you could say I have a hobby, it is going greeting-card shopping,” she said. “In the bookstore, I’ll beeline it straight for the greeting-card section.”
Okay, this explains a lot. She’s the type of person that answers, “Oh, I don’t have a television,” the second you bring up something Downton Abbey because you assume she’d “covet” that show. I’d venture to guess that when one of her friends gets some calligraphed greeting card in the mail, they roll their eyes and think, “Dammit, now I have to write Hannah back. Why can’t she just be on Facebook like the fucking rest of us?”
You’re not impressing anyone, Hannah. If anything, it’s creeping all of us out.
In February 2014, after earning a B.A. and an M.B.A. from the University of Denver, she was offered a job at the University of Kentucky as the director of provost’s initiatives, a position that required 16 interviews, she said.
Why did you bother getting your B.A. and M.B.A. at Condoleezza’s alma mater if you were just going to move to Lexington and surround yourself with a bunch of mouthbreathers that barely belong in the SEC? Furthermore, 16 interviews? I mean, if they don’t know they want to hire you after, like, seven interviews, isn’t that a pretty big red flag that someone throughout the hiring process hates you and wants your head on a platter?
Before she started, she asked her new boss, Christine Riordan, then the provost of the university, if a boyfriend came with the job. Dr. Riordan said that, in fact, she did know of one handsome, possibly single, chemical and mechanical engineering professor: Rodney Andrews.
Desperate much, Hannah? When I got hired here, I was stoked to get a Nalgene bottle. You didn’t see me asking Dave if he knew any way for me to get some honey on my stinger around the office. Be professional for me just one time, Hannah.
When Ms. Eddy saw Dr. Andrews on campus, she recognized him right away. “He has crystal blue eyes,” she said. “I already knew what he looked like because I’d been Googling him.” Dr. Andrews, who is 43 and the director of the Center for Applied Energy Research at the university, is particularly interested in researching cleaner ways to turn coal and fossil fuels into energy.
Oh, you Googled him, Hannah? And what came up? His Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and every other form of social media that you refuse to be on because you’re too busy penning letters like it’s goddamn 1912. If you’re going to sit in your ivory tower, you can’t be cyberstalking people before you meet them. That’s not how being off the grid works.
Ms. Eddy and Dr. Andrews were both members of a committee charged with formulating a five-year strategic plan for the university, so they often saw each other at meetings. “He’s a powerful, confident person,” she said. “I was really attracted to his strength.”
His “strength” and not the “Dr.” in front of his name. Yeah, sure.
Dr. Andrews, a divorced father, thought she was “very clever and very funny” and was surprised to find himself thinking about her a lot. “I wasn’t particularly looking,” he said. “I was busy and keeping busy. I was spending most of my time with my kids.” (His daughter, Quinn, is now 15; his son, Kelden, is 13.)
She was hot on your trail, Rodney. We all saw this from a mile away. She doesn’t care about her B.A., M.B.A., or being the director of provost’s initiatives. She wanted that ring, bro. You’re a divorced doctor? That’s like a lion seeing a limping gazelle in the distance.
Ms. Eddy and Dr. Andrews really got to know each other over coffee. “I exist on a flow of caffeine and sugar throughout the day,” Dr. Andrews said. Since Ms. Eddy often complained about the undrinkable coffee at the hotel in Lexington, Ky., where she was temporarily living, he began inviting her to the Starbucks near campus. Their orders reflected their opposite personalities. Dr. Andrews, a taciturn and serious scientist, never wavers into frothy territory. He always ordered black coffee. Ms. Eddy said she usually ordered “a grande extra hot skinny cinnamon dolce latte.”
Of course Hannah was ordering a grande extra hot skinny cinnamon dolce latte. If exclamation points were coffee drinks, they’d be a grande extra hot skinny cinnamon dolce lattes. And don’t even get me started on the fact that their love blossomed at a fucking chain coffee place. I paid $3 for the best Americano of my life yesterday at a local restaurant that wasn’t run by The Man. And let me tell you, it was delightful.
People describe Dr. Andrews as an idiosyncratic intellectual, a scientist with many unscientific interests and hobbies. He loves watching fake documentaries about Bigfoot, for instance. He makes his own bread, pasta, pickles, yogurt, cheese and hard cider. Growing up on a farm in Hadley, Mich., he read encyclopedias for fun and named the sheep he raised after Roman emperors like Nero and Claudius. “He had quirky little traits and a thirst to learn,” said Aimee Mertz, his sister.
Fake documentaries about Bigfoot? Red flag much, Hannah? That sounds like something Brendan Dassey would like doing. Sure, I’m a Michigan boy who likes making his own pickles too, but that’s just ludicrous.
For their first real date, he picked up Ms. Eddy in his car — a diesel Volkswagen Jetta — which he warned her was very messy. “My car is impeccably perfect most of the time, and his is a total disaster,” she said. “There’s Boy Scout fliers and pieces of dance costumes and archery bows and work things and gifts people have brought him from China. Right now, there’s a tea set in there. So many random things. I get in and don’t look.”
Wait wait wait, he drives a Jetta? No no no. Hannah, what are you doing, girl? Have some respect for yourself! You can’t marry a dude that drives a car that’s specifically reserved for hot girls. Like, Jettas are in the Top 10 Hot Girl Cars. If Saracen picked Julie up in a Range Rover, even Coach would’ve thrown a flag on that one. It just doesn’t add up.
On their second date, he made dinner for her: homemade pasta with ham he’d cured himself. “It’s amazing, because I am literally a TV-dinner person,” she said. He also showed her his compost pile full of coffee grinds and worms. “Another thing I really admire about Rodney is his focus,” she said. “When he becomes interested in something, he skips right past the amateur phase and wants to know everything that there is to know about it.”
Homemade pasta and ham he cured himself, classic Rodney. Showing someone your compost pile full of coffee grinds and worms sounds like something Screech would’ve done while trying to court Lisa Turtle.
Dr. Andrews introduced her to all kinds of mechanical contraptions. Once, after she commented that his homemade meals were sometimes too flavorful for her, he brought home a test kit that measured her taste buds. “He proved scientifically that I am indeed a ‘super taster,’” said Ms. Eddy, who is now the senior manager for external affairs in the university’s office of the executive vice president for health affairs.
Oh. My. God. Psycho City, Population: Hannah and Rodney. If someone asked to measure my tastebuds on a date, I’d check their house for an inordinate of bleach and bodies underneath the floorboards.
After a few dates, Ms. Eddy recalled, she asked Dr. Andrews if he wanted to be in an exclusive relationship. “I think everyone avoids that conversation because it’s hard to have,” she said. “But it’s a lot better to have that conversation than to live with the consequences of not having it.” Dr. Andrews, who appreciates clear definitions, said yes.
Hey Hannah, you start sending this dude artisanal gift cards yet?
She began mailing him greeting cards, which arrived in a steady flow. The very first card had a diagram of a caffeine molecule on the cover. The second showed a man peering into a test tube, with the caption: “Love Doesn’t Just Happen … It’s Science, Girl.” Inside that card, Ms. Eddy wrote, “Thank you for making the ‘happy’ chemical levels in my brain soar!”
Yep, there it is. I’m glad The New York Times pinpointed the exact moment when these two became the most unbearable couple on the planet. I imagine them looking like this:
The couple and his children began spending a lot of time together on a farm that Dr. Andrews owns in Kentucky — hiking, cooking on an outdoor grill and conducting official-seeming searches for Bigfoot using an expensive thermal-imaging camera. “He can take a lighthearted approach to life,” Ms. Eddy said. “He’s not just a scientist in his lab coat researching coal. He’s also a Bigfoot lover!”
Okay, I’m just going to say it — what a loser. I get it, this guy is a doctor. But Hannah, are you seriously falling in love with a dude that’s this into finding a faux Bigfoot? Do you two play with My Little Ponies and Pokemon cards to kill time too?
On June 1 last year — her birthday — he proposed in the small house near campus that they had recently purchased. He made steak, potatoes and a perfect chocolate mousse. While Frank Sinatra songs — another of her favorite old school things — played in the background, he presented her with three greeting cards. “The first was a happy-birthday card,” he said. “The second card was a funny, smart-aleck card. The third was about how great it is that she’s in my life.”
One card probably would’ve done it, buddy.
Just before their wedding, on Dec. 19, Dr. Andrews received a $500 gift card from Volkswagen — a good-will gesture after it was revealed that the company had tampered with the emissions technology on its diesel cars, including his Jetta. “That Jetta bought me my beautiful pearl-drop wedding necklace!” Ms. Eddy exclaimed.
Yeah, because I’m sure Dr. Rodney who owns a farm and goats couldn’t afford a pearl fucking necklace. Come on.
They were married at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, where the bride worked during her college years. Like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, an enormous chandelier constructed of lights and crystals hung above people drinking tea in the historic lobby, their heavy winter coats thrown over its chintz couches.
Tea? At a wedding? Yeah, right. Everyone knows that no one drinks anything at weddings except champagne, vodka, scotch, and beers beers beers. Get outta here with that tea talk.
The couple exchanged rings made of different materials: hers was platinum, while his was cobalt chrome, a material he described as “indestructible” and chose only after considering many other materials, including gold, carbon, iron, dinosaur bones and even metals contained in meteorites.
Had Dr. Rod chosen dinosaur bones, we’d have a whole new season of Making A Murderer to watch next Christmas.
Since the groom has raised and adopted several dogs throughout his life, his sister, Ms. Mertz, read a poem titled: “How Falling in Love Is Like Owning a Dog,” by Taylor Mali. (“It will run you around the block and leave you panting, breathless. Pull you in different directions at once, or wind itself around and around you until you’re all wound up and you cannot move.”)
I wonder if that poem had any exclamation points in it. If owning a dog is as easy as “falling in love,” then I need to have a long talk with all my friends about why they have girlfriends and not dogs. Because lord knows I’d rather spend my time with a bunch of Springer Spaniels running around than going to another shower.
The bride’s brother Jordan also spoke, describing the challenges of two academics falling in love and adjusting to using their hearts rather than their brains. Several days afterward, he added: “I’ve seen intelligence get in the way of finding true love. It can be difficult to give in to your more emotional side. Hannah is a perfectionist. She has lived her life very precisely, and love is messy. So it was a risk, but it worked out pretty beautifully.”
I hate to break it to you, Hannah’s brother, but you’re giving these two way too much credit. Your fucking sister just married a dude that uses a thermal camera to find a Bigfoot that he knows doesn’t exist. Register that, homeboy.
But honestly, with your whole “she lived her life precisely” and “love is messy” bit, I’m surprised you didn’t somehow loop the Jetta back in here again. For fuck’s sake. .
Image via Unsplash
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Will
Will (Twitter / Instagram) is the host of The Sunday Scaries Podcast.
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How much do you want to bet that Quinn hates her new stepmom?
I’m glad she asked to make it exclusive. Way too much competition for a 46-year-old divorced dad of two who shows off a glorified worm farm between trips to Starbucks.
I’m eager for the divorce announcement!
!!
It’ll prolly be in the obituaries.
That was so painful that by the end I could only read your commentary and not the marriage announcement.
This made me furious.
Probably really hit home for ya.
I read this Sunday and wanted to blow my brains out before the third paragraph.
She’s annoying and he’s a giant weirdo. Match made in heaven.
Once these insufferable people have children I envision something pretty much identical to how the Settlers live on those new Direct TV commercials…
Courtesy of The League:
Taco, “What did I tell you? Hot girl, Volkswagen Jetta. It’s a law, like water or dinosaurs.”