Wives recount serendipities around start of their love stories
Editor’s note: In anticipation of the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day, we recently put out a plea on our ANR Facebook page for readers to share their love stories with us. As writing prompts we posed such questions as, “How’d you meet?” “Who made the first move?” and “How long have you been together?” Two responses were posted on the page from Mallory Swantek and Theresa Nickolaus, and surprisingly both contained accounts of happy coincidences surrounding their relationships almost from the very beginning. We contacted the women to ask if we could share their stories and this article is the result of those conversations.
“My hubby and I met bowling,” Mallory Swantek began her post on the ANR Facebook page in response to a recent plea for Valentine’s Day love stories.
After following that intriguing statement up with a “heart eyes” emoji, Swantek laid out the chronology of the relationship with her husband, Chad, from there: “Met in 2012, married in 2018, baby in 2019 and if I could do it over I would meet him sooner so I could love him longer.”
“We met bowling” is not something one hears very often these days, so in a subsequent interview with Swantek we asked just what she meant by that statement.
“We originally met online,” Swantek explained. “I was sick of being around like guys at bars, and so decided to try the online thing and I needed to meet at a public place. And I still remember to this day saying ‘I have to meet you publicly. It’s in case you’re a psycho to make sure somebody knows where I’m at.’”
The public place turned out to be a bowling alley and Swantek says for her it was “pretty much” love at first sight.
“We met bowling and got to know each other that way,” Swantek explained. “He let me win. And we connected really well. And the longer we got to know each other, we started to realize we had all of these weird little coincidences in common.”
A couple of those serendipities Swantek shared in her Facebook post had to do with their mutual family backgrounds. The first was related the date they picked for their wedding in 2018.
“After we picked our anniversary date, we found out his maternal grandparents got married the same day years before,” Swantek wrote. “We also found out his paternal grandpa and my maternal grandpa served at the same place at the same time in Vietnam.”
Swantek says the two men met and got to talking to one another at her son’s baptism in 2020.
“They were probably serving right alongside each other and had no idea and they found out that they came home within the same month,” Swantek said, adding that the two men began to wonder whether they had possibly ridden home on the same train. “So all of those weird little coincidences keep happening!”
In comparing notes about their college years the Swanteks also figured out they had at least had the potential to meet one another years earlier.
“We found out that before meeting each other we had been at the same place at the same time,” she said. “He was in college (at Northeast Community College) and I lived in Norfolk. So that was kind of odd. Like, we had friends that were like adjacent to each other... I described a party that I’d been to and I described the place. He talked about being there before and sure enough, we were at the same place at the same time when we put the stories together.”
Swantek says there was even a strange fluke surrounding the naming of her son, whom she describes as a “miracle baby” due to the circumstances surrounding his birth. She says prior to his birth the couple had been trying to decide between two names, both of which had family ties — Owen Monty or Clark Kenneth. She says due to the difficulty surrounding his birth she didn’t get to see her baby until more than 24 hours after he was born.
“There was a huge Superman mural right when I walked into the NICU from my ICU setting and that’s when I knew, ‘Okay, Clark Kenneth it is!”
Swantek works as the Counseling and Prevention Coordinator for Central Community College in Grand Island and recently opened a counseling practice one day a week in Aurora. She said the family currently lives in Genoa but says they hope to move to Aurora as soon as they can find the right house.
‘Flat tire’ meeting
Happy coincidences also surrounded the first meeting and relationship of the second person to respond to our Facebook plea. Theresa Nickolaus of Aurora told readers she met her late husband Ross because of a flat tire on her car that happened under the Highway 30 overpass on Highway 281 in Grand Island in 1999.
“I had a flat tire on my little green Hyundai Accent and I had pulled to the side of the road,” Nicholaus wrote. “This guy pulled up right behind me in his full size Chevy pickup truck. I was scared out of my wits! I locked my doors and rolled up the window until it was just a crack. He changed out my tire lickety-split. He refused my offer of cash to pay him for his time and trouble.”
That chance “knight in shining armor” meeting was followed up a week later by a knock on the door of the house she was renting in Grand Island. Nicholas explained that Ross showed up at her door with a mutual friend who happened to be her landlord. The friend was also the same one she had called on her cell phone for help with the tire just before Ross showed up.
“I affectionately called him my ‘troll under the bridge,’” Nicholaus said. “We were opposites in most ways, however, we shared a dry sense of humor.”
That sense of humor can be seen in something that happened when the couple got engaged to be married in 2002, according to Nicholaus.
“I had been married before and he had never been married before, so there were probably some commitment issues on my side,” Nicholas admitted. “You know, being hesitant to commit because I didn’t want to get divorced again... I had made a comment about wanting a giant rock. I was just being silly about this, but I’m like ‘a giant rock,’ referring to a diamond. And he’s like, “Huh.” So he proposed to me on Christmas Eve of the year before we got married and put a giant rock in my Christmas stocking. He got this gigantic river rock and that was all that was in it, except for a note that was taped to it. It says ‘Here’s your giant rock!’ I’m like, what is this? And then he did have a diamond for me.”
Nicholaus said Ross’s random act of kindness in their first meeting was characteristic of the way he lived his life.
“He made a big difference in a lot of people’s lives,” she said. “I mean, if somebody needed help with something he was probably one of the first people to reach out and help them, just like he did for me in changing my tire. He did that for one of the gals at his work I found out just before he died. She had the same issue with a flat tire. She called him at work and said ‘I’m going to be late I need to find somebody to change my tire,’ and he went and left work and changed her tire and got her back to the office. So I mean, he was always doing stuff like that for people... So it was always about giving for him.”
The couple got married in 2003 and celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary in November. Tragically Ross was killed just 17 days later on Dec. 2.
Nicholas signed her Facebook tribute to her husband, “Always in my heart. In memory of Ross Nickolaus.”