They didn’t want to go out, but they found each other
Jajuan Legate didn’t want to be where she was, and Greg Archer didn’t want to be there, either. He said hello, and since then, they have wanted to be together, wherever that is.
A friend from Jajuan’s hair salon begged her to go to Cajun’s Wharf for Cinco de Mayo in 2011.
“I did not want to go,” says Jajuan, who had just ended a bad relationship. “I was not interested in going out at all. But I forced myself, and there was Greg,” she says.
Greg was new to Little Rock. He was recently divorced and he was immersed in a custody battle for his sons, Ian and Adam, who lived in Florida. His life was complicated and he, too, had resisted an invitation to go out that night.
“I was there with some friends from work,” he says.
Jajuan was eating a house salad at the bar with her friend when he saw her.
After introductions, he asked her to tell him about herself.
“I said, ‘My friends call me bossy. I love the ponies. I work about three days a week in my salon. And I am not interested in a boyfriend,’” Jajuan says. “And he said, ‘That works for me.’”
Greg invited Jajuan to swim at the pool in his apartment complex. Though he was not looking for a relationship, he discovered he wanted to be in her presence more and more.
“In addition to being gorgeous and having a great personality, she always wants to enjoy life to the fullest and experience new things,” Greg says.
Jajuan discovered he made her feel valued.
“What made me fall in love with Greg is that he just really took time to listen,” she says.
That first day, when they swam at his apartment complex just after she left work, she asked if he had anything she could use to remove her mascara. The next time she invited her over, he had stocked both the eye makeup remover and the contact solution as well as her preferred drink, Diet Coke.
He asked what Arkansas locations she had not visited but wanted to go see, and she mentioned Mount Magazine. Her birthday was coming up, and he planned a trip for them to go there to celebrate.
Jajuan and Greg were at ease with one another and
began spending as much time together as possible.
In July 2011, the man with whom Jajuan had ended a relationship before meeting Greg coerced her to go with him to Pinnacle Mountain and, in the parking lot, held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her. She managed to escape that day, but a month later he kidnapped her, at gunpoint, from her home. She shot him so she could get away, and he died at the scene.
Greg, says Jajuan, was a constant source of support through both ordeals, even though that they had just started dating. He gave her a
key to his apartment so she and her daughter, Erica, could stay there rather than at her home while he was away.
“I’m a very private person and I wasn’t giving him a key to my house, so for him to open his home to me and my daughter, to be so concerned and try to be protective — that’s huge to me,” she says. “He has been with me through all of this. A lot of guys would be like, ‘Oh, Lord, I’m out,’ but he’s been my rock.”
They went on a trip with Jajuan’s parents in 2013.
“She and I were at a restaurant late at night, just me and her,” Greg says. “The menu was different because it was late so instead of getting what we wanted we had chicken pot pie and Cobb salad. In the middle of the restaurant, I got down on one knee and proposed to her.”
They were married on July 12, 2014, in the rotunda at the
Arkansas State Capitol.
They honeymooned a couple of weeks before their wedding, relaxing at an all-inclusive Cancun resort ahead of their big event.
After the wedding, Jajuan and her daughter, then 11, went on a cruise.
“She had just been through so much,” Jajuan says.
Greg is director of architecture at Garver and Jajuan is the founder of Women’s Own Worth, a non-profit organization that helps empower women who have been the victims of domestic violence.
‘We both know how very blessed we are. We’re so supportive of each other,” she says. “I call him my tick-tickticker because he is so organized and so punctual and just professional about everything and I’m all over the place.”
Greg appreciates that Jajuan often pushes him outside his comfort zone.
“She’s not one just to sit at home and watch TV. If you’re with Jajuan you’re going to go out, you’re going to experience things, you’re going to have great life experiences,” he says. “I experience things that I never would have experienced before, and I’m so glad I did.”
Both of them are glad to have gone where they didn’t want to go back in May 2011.
“It was perfect timing, really,” she says.