Text out of blue led to date watching Family Guy
Cassie Grisham and Kyle Ford had run in the same circles for years, even spending time together in the same room, before they really looked at each other.
Kyle was a close friend of Cassie’s older brother, and his and Cassie’s paths crossed several times. Cassie was a senior in high school when Kyle and her brother first became friends.
Four or five years later, in 2005, they were at a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s house, and she really noticed Kyle across the room.
“A bunch of the guys, my brother included, were playing pool and I remember seeing Kyle and he had on this green beanie — green’s my favorite color. He kept catching my eye and I went down there and did the whole flirtatious thing,” Cassie says. Kyle was taken with her. “I had definitely seen her before that but it was always just ‘my buddy’s sister,’” Kyle says. “And I honestly don’t know how much we had even talked before that. It was probably the first time that we had been at the same place together for an extended amount of time.”
They exchanged numbers at that party and started talking on the phone.
Kyle was in physical therapy school in Alabama then, and Cassie still lived in Hot Springs.
“We kind of developed a relationship over the phone,” Kyle says. “We were closer when we were talking three states away than we were if we were sitting in the same room together.”
They lost touch after Cassie moved to Georgia.
“When she moved to Georgia she kind of severed ties with everything that had to do with home,” he says. “It wasn’t like we had a breakup or something. We kind of just didn’t talk much anymore.”
Cassie moved back to Hot Springs after four or five months in Georgia and started dating someone else.
Kyle eventually came back to Arkansas from Alabama and was doing his clinicals in Little Rock hospitals, and he and Cassie’s brother started hanging out again.
“We were at another friend’s house and Cassie’s name came up in conversation,” he says. “I realized, wow, I haven’t talked to Cassie in a year. I still had her number so I just texted her.”
The way Cassie tells it, that was exactly the push she needed as she struggled to get out of a bad relationship with the guy she had started dating when she got back to Hot Springs.
“That’s when our relationship really started,” Kyle says.
Cassie hadn’t even known Kyle was in town, so his text was a big surprise.
“It was completely random. He was like my knight in shining armor,” she says.
Their first date involved getting takeout sushi and watching Family Guy, Cassie laughs.
“It was really romantic,” she jokes.
They dated seriously for about three months when Kyle accepted a job in Mountain View, just before he formally graduated from physical therapy school. He had put down deposits and was set to leave Hot Springs.
Kyle says that although Cassie could have come with him, he doesn’t think she would have.
“And if I had taken that job, with us being almost four hours apart, we would have broken up,” he says.
A couple of weeks before he was to leave, they found out that Cassie was pregnant.
“I had been told I wouldn’t be able to have children,” she says. “There were really two things that I loved — music and children — so I really wanted to have children. And here I found out I was going to have a baby.”
Kyle backed out of the job — and the move — and stayed in Hot Springs.
“We didn’t want to jump into just getting married because that’s what we were supposed to do,” he says. “We wanted to get married because we wanted to get married.”
Cassie was eight months pregnant when Kyle found a vintage ceramic box topped with teddy bears — the theme for their baby’s nursery — and put an engagement ring inside. As Cassie looked at the box, he got down on one knee and proposed.
They planned to be married in Arlington Park in Hot Springs.
“But my beautiful wedding day got rained out,” Cassie says.
They moved the wedding to the Springs Hotel, where the reception was already booked. She and Kyle exchanged their vows there on March 30, 2008.
The Fords have two children — Kason, 4, and Charlie, 7 months.
“I love him more today than the day when we got married,” Cassie says. “To me, everything was in divine order, whether we realized it at the time or not.”