Wonderful! - Ep. 49: How I Met Your Podcast Host

Episode Date: December 13, 2016

Here's the situation: We didn't really have time to watch a reality dating show and prepare an episode for you this week. In lieu of our regular topic of conversation, we're talking about a different dating story, which is to say, our own. It's about to get vulnerable as heck up in here. MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Maybe, maybe you should go and do some contemplating. Right reason, right reason, being with your girl for all the right reasons. Right reason, right reason, being with your girl for all the right reasons. I'm the best of it, and I'm rapping to your poolside. Here to find true love, one man from the world. Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. The greatest love of all. Don't make me harmonize.

It did happen to us. Welcome. I'm Griffin McElroy. This is Rose Buddies. It's a podcast about The Bachelor, usually. Sometimes it's about Terrace House. Sometimes we only want it to be about Terrace House. Sometimes we have so much love and so much just erudite shit to say about the Japanese reality Netflix original television show Terrace House that it's all we want to talk about.

Even though the specter of a new season of Bachelor is looming. Couldn't be less interested. Just want to talk about those the six good good folks. Oh God, I've spoken too loud and I've awoken the child. No, he's okay. He's good. He just he would like you to keep it down. No, this is I'm projecting to the back of the, he's okay. He's good. He just, he would like you to keep it down. Um, no.

This is, I'm projecting to the back of the auditorium. Because there's people back there, and they pay good tickets for this podcast. And my grandpa's back there, and he has an ear problem. And it's important that I project. This isn't, this is not an episode where we're going to talk about a TV show. Here's the situation. We have a 17-day-old baby. His name's Henry.

You always know how many days. I feel like you're really counting. Every one of them is a treasure. Just kidding. Every one of them has lasted, it seemed like, about three and a half minutes. I can't fucking believe how long he's been here already. It's kind of buck wild. We didn't really have a TV show to watch.

No. So we have been watching television do you guys want us to talk about the office do you want us to talk about top chef maybe the answer to those might be yes it probably is yes but i i am a stickler for what we have come here to do um we just talk about love we went on a walk today and we briefly talked about uh discussing having a an early holiday special where we discussed Love Actually and our favorite storylines and our least favorite storylines. There's about four storylines in that movie

that could just jog off to use British colloquialism. Ooh. We're not going to do that. Continental. A&TM, Boys Not in the House, I don't think, starts back up tonight with Rita Ora. Yeah, I have no idea i know some

of our buddies are watching it tonight watch yeah that might have been fun but we really needed to get this recorded today because it's actually kind of a astonishingly a busy podcast week for yours truly which sucks yeah griffin is on paternity leave but really only in theory yeah um so this episode a lot of folks have asked us to do something like this and and it makes griffin wildly uncomfortable it does a little bit just because i think it's a it's super masturbatory but um yeah we should some disclaimers we we're gonna talk rachel and i are gonna talk about our our relationship maybe that'll be good it'll be like an about the author because this podcast is gonna go on forever and so it'll be like an about the author page. Because this podcast is going to go on forever.

And so it'll be like an about the author's page. I think, so here's how I want to couch it. I don't want to couch it as we know everything about love. And we're going to tell you about our love. Because it's going to be very useful to you as a person. No. What we're saying is we do a podcast where we talk about other people's love. So maybe it would be useful for you to know

where we're coming from our perspective is maybe i think there's also just a lot of folks who just wanted to know like how we how we how we met and stuff and um i i to be frank it's come it's so sweet we get messages all the time like hashtag relationship goals or whatever and i think that's i think i genuinely think it's very very sweet but i'm not a very like public person about that stuff so there's a bit of there's a bit of vulnerability here that i'm not entirely comfortable with by yeah i don't know i think it'll be fun i'm also worried that i won't remember everything and that'll be kind of a bummer like oh you'll be like oh you remember the seminal important iconic moment i'll be like oh i don't know i don't know i don't recall that i mean so here's the thing so i i'm gonna be probably pretty dry about it just knowing me

sure um and so i i don't i don't want you to feel any pressure to that's fair if you remember how the moon looked if this uh i it was a harvest moon. If this makes you uncomfortable, it's not your thing. I totally get it. See you next week. We'll be back. Oh, next week, let's go ahead and say this. We're going to watch the first season of The Bachelor. The Bachelor or Bachelorette?

It's Bachelor. It started as Bachelor. But we could do Bachelorette. Well, I don't know that that's available to us. Okay, so The Bachelor. First season of The Bachelor. It is on ABC.com. Yes.

So you can go watch it there. I think it might also be on Amazon. It season of The Bachelor. It is on ABC.com. Yes. So you can go watch it there. I think it might also be on Amazon. It's possible, yeah. And I anticipate we'll watch the whole season in a week, just knowing the amount of time we have on our hands. But we want to talk about, before we get into this new season, and guys, there's going to be a lot of exciting stuff with this new season that we're very excited about. Who's this character? I don't know. I think this character? I don't know. I think it was, I don't know.

I don't know who the character was. Okay. Before we get to that, I think we should take a look back. See, look how far we've come. Look at where you started, to quote Hamilton in American Musical. You've seen that?

A lot of people are talking about this, Hamilton in American Musical. You know, I enjoy it. I've heard that one Lin-Manuel Miranda is a fan of the show. I did hear that. And that's always great to hear. Our show. Yeah, sure.

It really boosts my spirits. Like, we're doing something important. You know what I mean? All right, let's start our show. We're doing something important that's going to be remembered long after we're gone. Let's get going on the show. Just like Hamilton will be. Okay.

So. Well, so let's get some facts. Can we play the How I Met Your Mother theme song? It'll be like, boop, boop, boop. And oh, babe. And we could do this whole episode to our new baby. He's sitting right in front of us, unconscious as fuck. And we can be like, listen, sweet child.

Listen, sweet child. Do you know how it happened? The of you oh man that would take a turn i think is it taking a turn my sweet lovely are we talking about the nitty-gritty details as to how he was conceived oh we can get i oh you know daddy remember the day okay so let's let's start out with some facts and then see where we go i had had like four miller lights and now i want to go further you want to go before the before the actual creation okay okay this is gonna be tough it is isn't that okay so 2011 uh i was living times man it was simpler times though i mean it's you know it's been a rough year 2011 was pretty fucking great um i was living in austin and i was friends with uh justin minsker so justin is uh one of my oldest friends from huntington west virginia my hometown uh i grew up doing theater with uh him and his whole family um and we lived together while we

were in college in huntington we went to marshall and lived together there and then he graduated i think a year before me and left to sow his wild oats in that's a gross way of saying that but he left to come here to austin uh which i didn't know about never thought i'd live in texas uh because and the reason why is because it's fucking texas uh and so he did americorps at the same time i did americorps and we became friends uh and we have actually a big group of friends that all all met through americorps that americorps unit is like yeah that was we're still buds with like pretty much all of them yeah uh so So it was South by Southwest 2011. Right.

So I was living in Chicago at the time with my friends, with a couple of friends. And they were a couple and it was great. Like I, it was one of my like favorite years ever. I love Chicago so much. And we had a really great place in Roscoe Village. But they were talking about getting their own place after our lease was up in July. And so I started kind of looking around. So I'd been working for AOL at a website called Joystick for a long time. And it meant I could work from home. And once I graduated from college, it basically meant I could live anywhere I want. So I looked around at some

different places. I moved to Batavia, Ohio, just outside of Cincinnati with Travis when I graduated Marshall in 2009. We lived there for a year. It was kind of lame. I love Cincinnati. Batavia is not Cincinnati. It's like 45 minutes away. And so that kind of sucked. It was great living with Travis, though, obviously.

And then I moved to Chicago from there. But I had spent a lot of time driving around the country and go like testing out different cities to see where i wanted to go and so i had sites on like seattle and i had sites on boston um and that it didn't it didn't click because i came to austin instead yeah so uh south by southwest for those that aren't familiar um has really grown huge even since i moved here in 2008 it's fucking over it's oh i'm sorry i came at the peak year and then it's just it's over now it's like a week-long festival of movies and music and technology and what i had done and um some of our friends have done is you take a few days off during the week because the shows during the day are free so wednesday through saturday if you go downtown you can walk into almost any bar and see free shows which is uh what i was doing and justin was doing and justin's

friend griffin was doing when he came to town i came to town uh at justin's behest uh because he knew i was kind of shopping around for a new city i really liked chicago 2011 though was in 2010 the winter of 2010 into 2011 was the snowpocalypse or whatever it was called it was a famously shitty like yeah uh snowstorm that lasted there was like two feet of snow on the ground on my fucking birthday which is in april so like um and working from home like i didn't uh get a chance to like get out and meet a whole bunch of folks and so like i was cloistered essentially for five months out of the year and as much as i love chicago like that was just not the life for me and so i kind of wanted to

get out and so i came to the opposite there's actually and what's interesting is um since i've moved here there's actually a or there was i don't know if it's still in operation but like a pipeline carrying 20 somethings directly from chicago to austin well you can say that with a lot of major cities i guess people people are moving to austin daily in huge packs um so i flew down here to stay with uh justin and his girlfriend uh now wife uh. Uh, I think we were staying at their, their, uh, Justin and Bristol weren't living together.

No, they weren't, but I was staying at the, at the, what was called the compound, which was Bristol's, uh, Bristol's stepdad's place.

Yeah. On the country. Yeah. And it was really great. It was like a, it was a cool, it was a really, a wonderful trip.

I had, so this is like first, like Easter egg, fun fact. I had super bad diarrhea you remember that um i flew in and it was the sickest i've ever been and it hit me as soon as the wheels left the ground and like i was blown away do you know if you get sick on a plane you go to the the flight attendants and you're like hey i'm sick can i get medicine they're like

no they don't have medicine they just don't have it yeah that's surprising to me like even over-the-counter stuff i was like can papa get imodium please i've asked a flight attendant for a pen before and they looked at me like what why are you talking why would we have a pen i have a theory that every airplane they like put just enough fuel in it like they weigh the airplane right before it takes off and they put just enough fuel in it so like one tablet of imodium would throw off the trajectory of the entire thing um anyway really bad die die and i did the day that we met the moment we met i was my guts were just racked with plague uh another easter egg oh fine um not having to do with digestive issues uh so justin um big big hype

man for griffin uh didn't have any intention of setting us up but did connect me to griffin's podcast before i met him that's weird like you knew stuff so i had listed listened to maybe half a dozen episodes uh so i knew who griffin was and kind of you know that he had this show with his brothers and that he was funny yeah uh and very willing to talk about things like his diarrhea it's important to know it's like if if the the in the last season of how i met your mother when he meets the mother if like he had really bad diarrhea and that would be like a major plot point of that episode and so to leave it out would be disingenuous like our followers need to know they need to know anyway uh anyway i landed and pretty much right after like i dropped off my bags and then justin and bristol and i went down to the city um and walked around to a couple. We were on the east side of Austin, which is very, very hip, um, spot to be.

Uh, there's, there's a lot of, uh, you know, fancy cocktail bars and dive bars and food trucks and it's, it is, it's the cool part of downtown. Um, and so we went to a couple places and then we ended up at liberty bar right yeah liberty bar do you remember the name i see you've always remembered the name of the band i'm pretty sure it was sandra leche yeah um yeah i think you're right who i don't know super well but i i listened to a little i'm not 100 sure um but i'm i think that's who it was i don't know why that that stuck in my head it could be be completely untrue. But anyway. Yeah. And so you were there, I guess, with some other friends.

I was there with my friend Ashley, I think. Oh, yeah. And I had been downtown all day and had a purse full of swag from the various events that I had been to. So other thing about South by Southwest, part of the reason all the showcases are free during the day is they're usually sponsored, which means you can get koozies and you can get handkerchiefs and flash drives and any number of t-shirts of things that are sponsored. What if you had handed me a flash drive?

Like, hey, it's got two gigabytes want a kiss um but i met griffin here's a tin of snus i got it from the snus truck you want to smooch me that's real there was a snus truck um we all did snus and got really addicted to snus for like two years i have never i have never done snus it's great it's like snuff but like it comes in a little ketchup packet i guess i don't know i've never done snus. It's great. It's like snuff, but it comes in a little ketchup packet, I guess. I don't know. I've never done snus either. So gross. And yeah, so I met Griffin, and Griffin was squinting, as I recall.

As I was wont to do. Sunny day in Texas, and I had two pairs of sunglasses. They were Mike's hard-punched sunglasses. Yes. I remember that. One pair was They were Mike's hard punch sunglasses. Yes. I remember that. One pair was orange and one pair was red. And so I had just met Griffin and I said, do you want one of these pairs of sunglasses?

And he picked the orange pair. And I said, well, red's traditionally a little more rock and roll. And Griffin was like, that's not really my speed. I know who I am. This is an important totem in mine and Rachel's relationship. I have lost the sunglasses. Yeah, he does not have them anymore. But he wore them the whole time he was here. I did, yes.

Partially because of love, but also because it's very bright. It's very bright. A couple of things you need to know. I had been single for a super long time. Like over two years, right? Isn't that what you told me? Thereabouts, yeah. I mean, you'd been on dates.

I'd been on dates, but I hadn't had a girlfriend for a while. And you had had a boyfriend for a long time, but you had been single for... Gosh, let me think. So only for like four or five months. Hell yeah. The other thing you need to know is I had just the grossest beard. It was so bad. Griffin looked like a man that had been single for a long time.

He had an unfortunate haircut, as I recall. He was a little shaggy. No, I didn't have a super unfortunate haircut. It was pretty shaggy. Pretty shaggy. Well, guess what? You had dumb ears. Well, I still do.

No, I love ears. Come on. He had a scraggly beard. He was wearing clothes. That looked super fucking cool. I bought out of the cool clothes catalog. You got them from Express, man. They did not suggest this is a man who's single and ready to mingle.

I'm really taking a fucking beating right now. Well, all of this to say. It's a miracle you ended up with me. No. No, I agree. Absolutely. What other bad things were there about me? No, I'm saying that Griffin was not putting off a, like, when we met, he did not put off a vibe of like. And off a like when we met he did not put off a vibe of like and for a very long time i am i am after you miss rachel but i was super into you and that

can be backed up by our friends justin and bristol because like when we went home to to uh to the place i was staying at uh we like stayed up for a super long time and i was like so you think rachel's gonna be around at the stuff tomorrow? Yeah. So I had no idea that Griffin was interested, probably until the last day that he was in town. But I did spend a lot more time with our friends during that week. It seemed like every day I was getting a text from Justin or Bristol.istol i think they were definitely like they were definitely pulling some strings um i think i think bristol maybe bristol justin was not shipping us super hard yeah um so yeah then we just sort of kept hanging out

like we would go to a bunch of different yeah every day adam duritz had a um i forget what it was called it was called like some something in smoke it was like his label that he was putting together adam duritz is the dude from uh counting crows uh anybody yeah wait no i remember what it's called it was called the uh counting crow super shows it was called oh baby i don't think that was it it was called crotally awesome that was what it was it was Crotally Awesome. That was what it was. It was Crotally Awesome. It was great. That's what I'm talking about. Like, South by Southwest is so commercial now.

And they don't do stuff like this where you just roll up. And, like, we saw, like, a dozen shows and ate free fried chicken and drank free beers. Thanks, Adam Duritz. You're a good dude. Yeah. Now South by Southwest, it's just over. It's so commercial. Some people would argue that it was commercial in 2011.

Somebody might also argue that I put up a panel for the panel picker for South by Southwest 2017 and was denied. And so maybe I'm a little bit salty. So yeah, we just kept hanging out and going to shows together. Yeah, I don't remember a lot of specific conversations. The first time I remember really talking to you was the night we were at Opal Divines. Yeah.

So the last day I was in town, um, Oh, you remember this was, this was the second to last day. Oh, was it? Well,

it was last day was East side showroom. Right? Yes. So, um, this, but that was the day that we met up with Jordan Morris. Cause we did a,

I don't even think, I don't know if he knows this, this story, but we went to, and I think it was just me and you and justin and justin we went to the el casino camino is that right el camino casino something like that something like that it's some bar on sixth street i've been to sixth street bars like three times in my whole life since i've been here uh but we did a little max fun meetup with me and jordan from jordan jesse go and you came along

and it was super fun um yeah it was a real power play i know griffin wasn't attending it was not that in fact i was like really actually i've dug you a lot and i was kind of uncomfortable with like check out my check out my following yeah i mean it wasn't like this was early this was 2011 so it wasn't like it was packed with fans. No, no, no. But it was definitely like, hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, here are all my fans. So, so call me, baby. So yeah, we did that, and we went out to, like, dinner with a bunch of people, and I tried to, I don't know, I tried to flirt, I suck at it.

Yeah, so Opal Devines, we went, it was just Justinin and bristol and me and griffin that were there a little double date um and that's when griffin came back to my house very briefly oh yeah to pee yeah we dropped you off at your house it was a nice house was that when you're living on 30 43rd 43rd and i popped in there i was like let me just get in there to piss and i did and you had a we still have it it's in the living room you had a uh mondo peewee's playhouse or peewee's big adventure poster i was like cool poster yeah so the the joke that griffin doesn't remember making oh i remember it oh he asked if he could use my bathroom and i said yeah i mean if you're you know if you're okay in there or something something like that i don't know something crass and then so he used my

bathroom and then came out and he's like i think you're really gonna like what i did in there that's pretty good pretty good pretty sexy maybe maybe even a little bit sexy and playful um and then the last night you were in town yeah this was that was when i thought at least smooth moment that's when i thought griffin might be into me and he said showroom which was is it closed they're closing it is closed now i know it's real sad um it was like the quintessential like hipster yeah it has like a like a speakeasy kind of vibe all the cocktails are like 15 dollars um they're good but come on uh but we went there and we went with a big group of people we met our friend eric uh who had a couple of friends in from out of town there were like i don't know like we went there and we went with a big group of people. We went with our friend Eric, who had a couple of friends in from out of town. There were like, I don't know, like 10 people there.

And we were sat at this huge table, which is a pretty small bar. So it's weird that we had this huge table. And Rachel and I were sitting like three people away from each other. And I kept trying to have conversations with her. At one point, apropos of nothing, Griffin turned to me. And this seemed remarkable because griffin is not he's not like a chatty guy really with like i am in a group of friends where if i know everybody at the table i'll fucking talk too much but not like not like a hey this is the first time we've

met i want to know all about you kind of guy sure so he turned to me and he said so what do you do and i just remember thinking like wow, I've never seen him ask anybody else's question. And it seems like a, like, not really a germane topic. Yeah, sure. I know that doesn't sound like a super strong pickup line, but it felt it felt like something. I mean, I've been playing you hot and cold for like three straight days. And that was that was the prestige. So yeah, we talked a little bit more that night and then i flew home to chicago and this was in march um and so i basically decided like day one that i wanted to move here because i love austin so very very very much but this was the first time that i'd like

really been into somebody in a super long time and so it kind of like sealed the deal and so like i decided and i told justin like i want to move to austin and he was like you can live with me uh because because his lease i think was also getting renewed at the same time that mine was up yeah like summertime um and so i went back home yeah this would have been mid-march because the first time i reached out to you was on your birthday which was march March 29th. And I like left you some stupid Facebook comment on my Facebook wall, guys. It was dumb. I don't remember. But I remember, I do remember like thinking about posting that comment for a long time, because like, she doesn't know me super well. And so it's weird for me to leave a happy birthday message.

I deliberated for a super, super long time. But this is such a good payoff. And it is the most like, digital age dating shit ever in that like i sat there and i agonized over sending you this happy birthday wall post on your facebook wall and i published it and then like six minutes later i heard a little ping and you had sent me a little facebook chat and we facebook chatted for like three minutes i don't even think facebook chat still exists like the little pop-up chat thing that we use that doesn't exist anymore it was it was my it was my birthday and i had just been out for drinks with justin and like all the people we had hung out with yeah um and so i just started chatting it was very but it was very benign

i forget what we talked about i think we talked about chicago hot dogs and stuff we ended up getting on the topic of quizzes or something. Somehow we started talking about, like, online quizzes. Do you remember the website? Oh, you're talking about Sporkle? Sporkle, yeah. We sent a lot of that. So this kicked off a digital correspondence between Rachel and I that is, I'm really grateful for it.

Obviously because, like, we ended up together. But also because, like, we have. We have an archive. An archive. for it obviously because like we ended up together but also because like we have we have an archive an archive like of like i i don't know a hundred and some odd emails probably yeah so we started emailing in march and we emailed pretty much every week sometimes twice a week until he moved here pretty long like i would spend nights like work working on these you you know, like, two-page long emails. Yeah, and we would ask each other questions. Yeah, so, like, how did, you know, what did you,

how was your college experience? So, like, what was that like? Well, or, like, if you were going to have five dinner party guests and you could have anybody, who would it be? Or, um... No questions, like, what that dick do, though. No. Nothing, like, I i can't that's important

no overt flirtation whatsoever just like and that's in a way like i i you say like you couldn't tell whether or not i was into you even during this correspondence and like if i'm asking you like what it was like growing up in st louis and like what your childhood was like hey dog hey buddy guess what like um yeah i i had never i had never had a guy be interested in me that wasn't overtly flirtatious yeah that's how i come at it so i i just kept second guessing whether or not you were interested it's kind of astonishing that this worked right because like there's another universe in which like i don't know like i, like, I'm just the, I'm a creepy dude. And it wasn't like I was sending you email after email, like, hey, you up, you up, you up.

But, like, I think there's another universe in which, like, you know, you move too fast and you ask these big, big, big questions and one of the people gets spooked and sort of runs away. And I also think, like, I don don't know i get really nervous about sensitive digital correspondence of any sort and this was like really really sensitive stuff but it was really sweet like it was the emails were so sweet like i love and i love that i can just like go back and read them yeah um no it's it's really nice i i am a big fan of the written correspondence griffin and i will still send each other emails occasionally when we're traveling. Yeah. That are just nice to have. And I think it only worked because we had, we had met each other and hung out for a few days. And it wasn't like I was like cold, cold calling you or something like that. Yeah. And I feel like in that we got to know things

about each other that like other people just never got to know about us. Right. Which was great. So in July, I moved down justin actually flew up to chicago and then we threw everything i owned in my toyota matrix and then drove down to austin and then like uh oh yeah oh and griffin and i exchanged phone numbers and that was my doing yeah that was a big play rachel i mean from this point on rachel makes all the forward momentum until i uh no that's not true because you got you got pretty spooked also sometimes i did yeah i was super freaked out but i just i felt like i was not i was not quick to rush into anything with griffin but i knew that i liked being around him and i liked talking to him

a lot yeah well because the boyfriend that you had before that was like almost a decade like it was a long relationship and so like i can i wasn't looking for anything serious and i knew griffin was like a serious guy and so i was nervous about that but i also knew that we had just been emailing for a long time and if we were going to get together i wanted to get to that pretty quick yeah sure um so i moved down here and then we i think you came over like the first night you texted me right away we got in town. Because Bristol and I had left a bunch of surprises for you and Justin in the house. I think one was a poster for the movie Ping Pong Playa. Yeah. And the Sweet Valley High board game.

And the Chicago Bears vinyl of the Super Bowl shuffle. Fuck, I wish I'd hung on to that. I don't know where that ended up. I bet Justin probably has it. I think Justin has it. And that first night, we ended up texting like a lot that night because Justin had a roommate back then who hadn't managed to get all of his stuff out yet. And so he was in the room that I was supposed to stay in.

And so I slept in Justin's room. And like, I remember texting you about that. Oh my gosh, that was so funny. That made me like kind of have a crush on you because you texted me that Steve was in your bed. And I said, you're never gonna believe this, but Steve is also in my bed. And then you said Stephen Hawking has a theory. All beds contain a little bit of Steve. Steve's a great dude. It wasn't, you know, it was a complicated situation. Steve's a great dude. It wasn't, you know, it was a complicated situation.

And then, yeah, we started dating really quick. Yeah. So Griffin and I pretty much saw each other or talked every day that he was in town. The first, like, move I remember making is we wanted to play that Sweet Valley High board game. Yeah. And so Grace, our friend Grace, was over at your house and was like, hey, let's come over and play Sweet Valley High. And so this is the most perfect encapsulation of how clueless I was about anything. In that I showed up to the house with, because I didn't want to be rude, I wanted to bring something. So I brought some beer.

Like a 12 pack. I brought like a 16, 18 pack of scheiner bock like enough for each of us to have six i was like what we're just playing a board game and then it was like it was like six o'clock in the evening or something yeah it was not part of a weekday i didn't know so uh i get there with uh 100 beers in the sweet valley high board game and grace who is the best uh she says uh i'm gonna go and just leaves. And so we ended up hanging out. And then I went back to your house and played Scrabble with you.

We played Scrabble for a while. And then we... No, just kidding. Come on. Not yet. We have a baby. Like, come on. They know.

So, yeah. So Griffin and I kept in contact. And I had been talking to my friends at this point and said there's this guy we've been emailing i think i like him but i'm not sure if we have like real romantic chemistry and my friend courtney actually um was the one she's the one that lived in paris that i visited she's like you need to just kiss him yeah like you need to kiss him and then you'll know so we did we have one night we went to a bar on e6 right cheer up charlie's um that was like the most fun dance plate well barbara is the most fun dance place but the second most fun dance place

uh in austin and we went and i remember having a super good night uh we also went back to your place and we played dance central we did didn't we we did a lot of dancing that night um did we hold hands and cheer up charlie's i think we might have you have a memory of that happening i oh sorry and then i guess it was only special for one of us see this is what i can't believe henry has to be in the room while we do this now um so yeah we ended up going back to my place and i think we were were watching Friday Night Lights, right? That was a very similar. So let me let me give you the timeline here. So we were playing Dance Central.

And I noticed I had decided that night that we were going to kiss. This is this is how my brain works. I was like, we're going to kiss tonight, and then we'll figure it out. And so we'd had some drinks. And I noticed that every time Griffin would like get up, he would like come back and sit directly next to me. And so i felt pretty good about signals uh and then everybody left and it was just justin and bristol and me and griffin watching friday nights and by the way during our our convalescence that's not the right word during our our paternity maternity leave we fucking powered through basically the whole series again except we skipped the second season go watch that show

it's fucking great even if you think it's not going to be your kettle of fish uh that's not that how that colloquialism works either um it's so good just skip season two entirely and you're going to be aces uh but yeah we were watching that show. Continue with the scene. It's about to get pretty steamy in here, folks. So at their place, there was a couch and a chair. And it was kind of a big chair. So Justin and Bristol took the couch, and Griffin and I shared this big chair. And this is the first sign that Griffin really gave me for sure that he was interested uh and that he put his arm around me so fucking and he kind of like rubbed my arm with his hand

hell yeah dude are you kidding me so smooth i remember everything being like all you and me being like a like quivering little like like a it was really smart that you were like that though like i make fun of you but again i i was out of an almost 10-year relationship yeah um and recently single yeah so anything else would have spooked me i i really liked feeling like i was kind of in control in a way um so yeah justin bristol went to bed and then we smooched i don't want to get this is making me very nervous i so so griffin and i were sitting next to each other and you're gonna go so deep into this i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go so deep i'm just gonna say that griffin like kind of leaned his head against me and i was like well we can't kiss if his head is on me so i kissed his ear yeah and then i was like that like activated griffin he was

like oh we can kiss now yeah that was i i said that you've broken the curse and so we did some kissing yeah we did some kissing that was good uh and then i it was time for me to leave because i'm a lady and uh and then griffin was like well maybe we can do this again sometime and he didn't realize that i had consciously decided like we were going to kiss this evening and then we were going to make a decision about our relationship so he was like maybe we do this again sometime i thought that was really funny because i was like i i guess he thinks that i i didn't make this this was a spontaneous decision yeah or that i thought that this was a at this point like a four month long slow play just to get one night of some kissing and then that was that was how that's how um intimacy works that's how romance works you work for four months and

then you get kissed a little bit and then that's it and then we were really serious right away like basically going full steam ahead we saw each other pretty much every day uh and and yeah it was so good like it was still super good but it's like the best like it was it was unlike any relationship i'd ever been in and i'd been in like a few at that point and it was the most like i it's it's you're i think you're lucky to have a relationship like that at any point in your life you're just like oh this is all this is how it yeah is and the other things were like good but like this this is how it's supposed to be. Yeah, there were never any games. Like, Griffin and I

were always very honest with each other. Like, we never did the like, oh, he called me, I'm gonna wait two days and call him back. Or we're gonna date other people, you know, and see how that goes. Or like, I'm gonna... I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If that was your... Again, like, I don't want to be like, it's the only

way to do it. I'm just saying, like, for me, me it was this it wasn't like hot and cold no it was this moment of like realization of just like this is this is the this is the this is it like this is the this has to be it because it's not it's so unlike the other stuff um and so we then i lived with justin for a year and then we moved in together. We moved in together in 2012. Really cute house on the Christmas Light Street in Austin. There's this very, very small street in Austin. Kind of like the North University neighborhood. Yeah, and every house on it used to do Christmas lights,

and they would run Christmas lights from house to house across the street, forming this beautiful tunnel of lights. But then those houses are now worth like $600 thousand dollars for like a nine hundred square foot house it was a little it's a little one bedroom house yeah now they're all rented out by ut students who aren't as festive and diligent because it's a lot of work it's really old there's like one closet in the whole house so cute though it's very cute um so we lived there for a year and then i proposed to you there um in 2012 2012 yeah and then we got married december 2013 so we were we were we pretty much knew what we wanted and we just we moved quickly after that we did yeah we were like the i think we were like the first of our and we have

we still have this big group of friends that were like our friends who helped hook us up and our friends that uh did americorps with rachel that are still like we had a we had henry a little over two weeks ago and our friends uh made dinner for us every night uh for the past two weeks and it's like those it's those friends it's like still those friends um but yeah so but we were i think we were like the first of our friends to like get married because we were just like fucking powering through you say that so there's there's another there's another thing that i've kind of alluded to on the show but i am older than griffin um like five years older so it's my favorite it's good it's really good like it's like a chris hansen to catch a predator moment to do to you uh to like

just like how you feel when i say it so so while we were the first of our friends here in austin to get married you know i was 31 when we got married and most of my friends that i went to high school with were married and had a couple kids actually sure so i in that sense i was kind of a late bloomer. But I will say that, yeah, here in Austin, we really kicked it off. Yeah. Because most of our friends here are closer to Griffin's age, I think, than mine. Trying to think of other stuff.

Like, it was just like a really good, we bought our house a few months after we got married that we live in now and where we have the baby. a few months after we got married that we live in now and where we where we have the baby yeah i think the thing the thing about griffin and probably all the mackleroys that was unique for me uh is that griffin and travis and justin they're all very family focused and all of them i think would say confidently that a goal for them has always been to get married and have kids yeah sure like like griffin when we dating, never did any of that. Like, well, I don't know if I'm ready to settle down. And like, I'm kind of afraid of commitment.

Like, if anything, I was more nervous in the beginning of our relationship, because Griffin seemed so clear and what he wanted and how he felt about a lot of that's coming from like a place of i was very i was very privileged i was very lucky to like i had the joystick job which turned into the polygon job and i had my brother my brother me which even back then was doing really well like one one year in and i knew that like we had kind of caught on to something that i loved doing um and so i found all of this fulfillment in like work and life and everything else.

And so I was like, I was ready to go. And I was so lucky that all of those other stars aligned because yeah, like I wasn't hesitant really at all. Yeah. And we've told some of our other stories. Like when I didn't propose to you. Like when you didn't propose to me in Mexico. I don't want to talk too much about the proposal because again it's very sensitive but we did that we did

it at our small cute house i set up some lights in the backyard yeah griffin surprised me i had been out of town for work and i came home and you made me stop at walgreens to get you your birth control pills and i was sitting in the parking lot like are you kidding me now um and and yeah i well you know we we we don't fight really we have a lot of the same interests uh i think our temperaments are similar yeah the example i used to say and this is sad that i thought that this was like such an important um like point for people to get along with in order to like stay, stay, stay super into each other, is we always wanted to leave parties at the exact same time. And it's like, sometimes it'd be late. Sometimes we, whenever I want to go to, like, two, I want to just rage, you are there also. But,

like, most of the time it's, like, 11, and I'm looking at the door, and you're like, yeah. But there's never been an instance where it's like, oh, on yeah i'm having fun yeah no we're pretty much always on the same page uh we've traveled a lot which has been super fun both for like doing live shows for the podcast which you get to come on when i met griffin he had never left the country that's true yeah and then i i left a couple times for for polygon i went to germany and tokyo we took our honeymoon in japan we went to tokyo hakone and kyoto and like are obsessed with it which we talked about during the terrace house episode we went to hong kong last year which was really fun like that's my favorite thing to do

with you because i don't know what the fuck i'm doing anywhere like i don't know what the fuck i'm doing in texas ever uh let alone you know hong kong and so like being there with you and sharing that like that terror with you is really really fun um and then yeah we had we had a baby and then we just tried we tried for a bit and then it happened we found out on easter uh that we were having a baby rachel walked into the room with the pregnancy test and i had just gotten an oculus rift dev kit too and so i had that on i was playing some shitty game and rachel walked in she was like babe i took off the headset was like oh shit it was really great it's like one of the best moments yeah and then he got born he got born uh black friday which is cool and then december 7th we just celebrated our three-year wedding anniversary wedding anniversary oh our wedding was super fun

it was out in the country uh basically like 30 minutes past the airport from austin if you know austin then you kind of i think no one cedar creek near bass yeah uh and it was at the cutest little place it was like a little um sort of like farmhouse country country house um mason jars mason jars as far as the eye can see. Wood tables, the whole thing. We loved planning the wedding and had such a great time. One caveat, it was a mostly outdoor wedding. And what you have to understand is it's December right now. It's December 12th, and it was 60 degrees outside today. That's the norm.

It was like 17 degrees on our outdoor wedding day. Yeah, there was freezing rain after our ceremony. And we invited over 150 people. Like, 70 showed up. Which, it wasn't like everybody who showed up RSVP'd to show up. You're making it sound like people are like, hmm, the weather's too bad. I'm going to stay home.

No, I know. I'm just saying, like, it was a very, very small, very chilly intimate. So we had a brisk, by both definitions of the word ceremony like outside and oh and griffin's dad was our officiant yeah my dad uh officiated for us and then we basically uh luckily our wedding planner who was fucking amazing was like the day before like why don't we get a big tent and we were like uh yeah i guess so yeah with heaters and then she like filled it with heaters and we basically just got in there and everybody got drunk and just like danced to stay warm there's also like a fireplace inside it was the cutest place there's a fireplace inside

if anybody wants to get married um cedar bend yeah it was called uh in austin or the austin area we we have a very strong recommendation for you uh What was great is we had a fireplace inside and people were going there for survival. And like people were meeting that otherwise would not have met because they were gathered around this like communal survival point. Wasn't it your boss, Chris Grant?

Yeah, Chris Grant, my boss, was there with his partner, Aaron, who was pregnant at the time. I felt so bad because it was like so fucking cold and our our wedding planner was also our wedding was also pregnant yeah so they were like uh and like my nani was there like around the fire but like all of these people were meeting um because they were like gathered around this fire which i thought was like obviously it wasn't ideal and i wish that it had been the weather had been a bit nicer during our wedding but there was there was a lot of there's a lot of sweet stuff happening because of the cold um that's it i feel

like man i feel so uncomfortable still talking about this it's fun to talk about like i don't know it's nice we've wow i can't believe we got 45 minutes out of this that's a lot um yeah i think um i don't know how to like end it tie a little bow around that but all that to say so when we want okay let's oh let's talk about when we started watching the bachelor yeah yeah so so we i mean we've mentioned this before we started watching ben's season well you watched some before um and you turned me on to this show and it was when you were living at your old house on we're watching it on my laptop i'm watching on your shitty like 1951 macbook um and the fan was so loud we had to turn the volume up to max just so we could hear ben ben spout his uh oh my dad's um and you were like there's this show that i think you would

enjoy and i don't know why you thought i would enjoy it i think you just really wanted to watch it i don't think I ever sold it. And in fact, I just made it sound more like this is a thing that I do and you are welcome to do it with me. You didn't own a TV then. So it's not like you were consuming. That's what was so mysterious to me.

Griffin got me a TV as a present. I got you a TV for a Christmas present. As like a, I don't know how you're doing this. You need this. Yeah, because you also weren't one of those people that was just like television. Yeah, I was watching everything on my computer. Yeah. I was just cheap. Yeah, because you also weren't one of those people that was just like, television? Yeah, I was watching everything on my computer.

Yeah. I was just cheap. Yeah, I guess so. But yeah, you were like, I think it was even pitched like,

please watch this show with me. It's important to me and let's see how it goes. And I was like, okay. I don't think I ever said it's important to me.

You said it's an important thing for me. I'm going to do a podcast about it. There are three things, Griffin. There's family. Yeah.

There's friendship. Yeah. And then there's The Bachelor Bachelorette. The three Fs. Yeah, so we watched it the first season of ben's ben's season is such a good first season because like he's kind of a a dude that i think i'd love to get along with i'm so hesitant after the bachelorette canada i don't know who listens and who doesn't um but that was a season with courtney in it and like there was a lot of wild stuff i think lindsey was the runner up i don't remember i don't remember anything except courtney and ben um and so i watched it

and just like fell in love with it and and we didn't start doing drafting until like we did it the next season which was emily no no it was after emily it was the next bachelor after emily it would have been juan pablo yeah and that was just justin and bristol and me and you at that point i think it was just me and you for a year yeah we did it by ourselves by ourselves that doesn't seem right i think we did but anyway we like you it was it was like you've shown me this seductive new drug where you're like check this thing out i think you'd like it i was like oh not only do i like it i'm fucking completely obsessed with it um and so we've watched it constantly and then in two weeks right three weeks maybe i don't know not math is not my strong suit uh we're gonna start a new season i'm very excited for that

yeah i'll be henry's first bachelor oh nick um they announced all the bachelorettes we are going to break them down in a uh preview special that we're probably going to do last episode of the year um next episode again is going to be our um season one season one review um but yeah there's a lot of dolphin people in there huh there's a lot of a lot of folks in there a lot of people like dolphins i get it oh and did you see the most common names they're not anything we know there's there's like three pairs right there's two jasmines there's two jasmines jasmine what's up your your your brand is going worldwide i wonder if that's an aladdin thing if you think about about the 90s.

Shit. Yeah, I didn't even think about that. A lot of people have also pointed out that the women are, in fact, typical age. The average age is like 24 and three quarters. They are not close to Nick. It is not. Nick is 33, 34? Something like that, yeah.

That's a gulf. Yeah. That's a gap, isn't it? Yeah. It's a chasm. Not that there's anythingulf yeah that's a gap in it yeah it's a chasm not that there's anything wrong with that no i mean obviously i was just looking forward to a more mature uh female contestant and that is not what we saw that is not what we're gonna get instead we get a bunch of anamorph dolphin women who want to just stay in the transformation for over an hour that reminds me we should bring up again we've mentioned this a couple times but for those that are new

we have a listener named drew davidson who created a website called the rose reckoner which can help you keep track of your scoring so if you're looking to start a team he's got the new contestants up i believe you can you can get in there and start putting together i think we might actually use it this year because it's it's kind of a first of all rachel takes a copious amount of notes each each episode and so it's hard to keep track and there's always scoring discrepancies when we do this with friends a lot of people will count things and then we spend a lot of time arguing whether something was a just a kiss or a makeout which which is fun. But we have to spend our time.

Yeah, those arguments get really heated. They get really fucking nasty. Yeah, sure. Like, what tips the scale from a kiss to a makeout? We've had a lot of debates about that. Visible tongue, that's a makeout, obviously. And duration, that's where it gets sticky. Duration, hands on the head and neck, it's important. These are actual arguments that we've had with our friends,

our very good friends. I hope this episode didn't come out as braggy or super masturbatory. I don't know. I think folks probably. Yeah. I think, I mean, Griffin and I are obviously very happy and we appreciate that a lot of you

have been interested in our story. And it does, it does definitely inform how we watch these shows you know so i don't feel like it's totally crazy that we talked about it i guess not um but yeah thanks for listening next week again season one of the bachelor please watch terrace house a lot of you have if anyone just joined our facebook group i love it i love they probably think that we are exclusively a terrace house thing there's nowhere for me to go to get the kind of like i'm a member of the fucking terrace house fan community you know what i mean like i'm not the member of a fan community for much shit but i want to know everything about this show i want to watch all the old stuff i want to look at terrace house memes i want to like you know what i mean i'm trash yeah i want

to know everything about the panel i want to know not only that i want to know what everybody else thinks we've been telling our friends about this show just because i'm so desperate for people to talk to last night justin sent me a text about hansan and it like lit up my life travis is watching it now and i'm like so psyched i know where what episodes he's like about to get to it's like and i guess so aloha is coming to netflix jan 1 is what i've heard yeah so we're gonna we're gonna have a lot to watch in a few weeks it's very exciting i mean what are we fucking kidding bachelor starts on jan 3rd if they put up all of the aloha state episodes we will finish them by then yeah we will watch all of them in two days um thanks you guys for listening thank you for listening go watch

bachelor season one it's on abc.com and uh we'll talk about it next week or don't watch it what the fuck ever you're probably pretty busy it's the holidays and it's a pretty stressful time for everybody should we do a holiday episode i don't even know what we would do i don't know what we would do that would look like this is our holiday episode fuck off just kidding we love you very much whoa i'm feeling punchy okay uh thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week until then i'm griffin mcelroy i'm rachelElroy. When you're ready. Final Rose.

Stay with us on this journey of joy. Spoiler alert. She is up with Soulja Boy. Right reasons. Right reasons. Can't figure out all four seasons.