Some old photos get better with age, and a film snapshot from a Boston house party in May 1998 might be the best recent example.
As Newsweek reported, Brenna Jennings posted the picture to social media last spring under her handle @ogbrenna, and the caption turned it into something much bigger than a throwback. “I was dating the guy in the chair, but I married the guy in the window,” she wrote.
The photo shows a young Jennings perched on the arm of a chair, laughing beside her boyfriend at the time. Off to the side, seated quietly near a window, is Steve, the man who would eventually become her husband. The post struck a nerve, racking up more than 9 million views and 238,000 likes, according to Newsweek.
The picture, likely snapped by her sister, came from the last party Jennings and her roommates threw before leaving their first apartment after college, with everyone about to scatter into new lives. She had been dating the man in the chair for about a month after meeting him at a live music show that spring. “We were young, tan, living in the city and enjoying each other’s company,” she told Newsweek.
The man in the window was just her roommate then, and not one she saw much. They worked opposite schedules and crossed paths rarely. “I thought he was quirky and did not for a minute consider him to be my ‘type,’” Jennings said. He did have one running bit she remembered: when her boyfriend left phone messages, her roommate would relay them by announcing that “the model called.”
The chair relationship fizzled within months as their lives pulled in different directions. Around the same time, the window guy left Boston for a month in California and asked Jennings to hold onto his stereo while he was gone. They started talking more, and the talking started to mean something. “At some point, I realized how funny, smart, and even-keeled he is,” she said. By December, they were officially together, and he moved in soon after.
Nearly three decades of marriage later, the couple lives in New England, where they have raised a daughter who is now approaching high school graduation, fostered dozens of puppies, and weathered the usual run of life’s highs and lows together.
Asked what she would tell the young woman on the arm of that chair, Jennings did not hesitate. “I’d say first of all, look at how pretty you are! Stop imagining yourself to be too tall, too loud, too much,” she said. The guy in the chair was great-looking, she admitted, but as she put it, “I was no slouch!”
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