He checked her out on Facebook and liked her
Martie North was on a mission when she walked into a bar in downtown Little Rock in May 2011. When she walked out, Scott Hamilton set out on his own mission — to go out with her.
Martie went to Twelve Modern Lounge in downtown Little Rock to interview a band for a story in a friend’s online magazine.
She saw several people she knew at the club, and she stopped to chat with Ricky Mays Jr., a guy she had known for years. Scott, Ricky’s cousin, was there with him.
“They were telling some of the most hilarious stories about their childhood that made me question how on earth they were alive to tell the stories,” Martie says.
Martie left them and did her interview, said a quick goodbye when she was done and left.
“As far as I knew that was the end of it,” Martie says.
Later, though, she got a Facebook friend request from Scott.
“I maintain a very strict 300-person Facebook group. No more than 300 friends and I have to know everybody, I don’t allow strangers into the group at all,” she says. “But I thought, well, OK, he’s a friend of Ricky’s and a few other people in there seemed to know him, so he’s probably safe.”
Scott had seen Martie around town — his office at the time was across from the bank building where she worked, and he had spotted her at various fundraisers and social events. They went to the same church, but they attended different services, and he sometimes saw her there, too.
“I was very intrigued. I thought she was really sharp,” says Scott of meeting her at Twelve Modern Lounge.
Seeing her posts on Facebook just reinforced that.
“She’s an extremely social-conscious person and she would post thought-provoking things about all kinds of things going on in society. She really made me think,” he says.
He was often the first to comment on her posts, and when she wrote that she wanted someone to go have sushi with her for lunch he sprung at the chance.
“Of course I responded that I would join her. I couldn’t stand sushi,” he says, though he has since come to like it. “But I was like, here’s my opportunity.”
Martie had issued a blanket invitation to her entire friend list, but Scott was the only one who showed up to meet her that day. Over lunch, they chatted about work and family, about how he had just moved back to Little Rock to be near his mother, who was ill, and how she had lost her mother the year before.
They finished eating, and she told him she needed to drop off some shoes for repair and head back to work. Scott was impressed that she had used a GroupOn voucher to pay for her meal, and he was impressed again that she was the kind of person who had shoes repaired.
“I like nice things but I’m cheap as hell,” he says. “I said, ‘This is my kind of woman.’”
Scott considers that lunch to be their first date. Martie doesn’t.
She thinks of their first date as happening later, when he asked her to see the opening of Cars 2 at Breckenridge movie theater after she posted about her excitement about seeing the film.
“I’m a huge Pixar fan,” Martie says.
After the movie, they went out for drinks. And after drinks, he made sure she was busy every day — with him.
“There was a strategy behind that. I was determined,” he says. “I made sure that she was doing something with me every day so that any potential suitors would be eliminated.”
Scott and Martie dated for four years before he surprised her with a proposal.
“We were coming in from church and I’m walking from the kitchen to the dining room and he literally gets down on one knee,” she says. “I was like, ‘What the heck are you doing? Oh, oh, wait a minute …’ I was totally oblivious. I was so focused on a task it took me a minute for it to sink in what he was doing. But we had had zero conversations about marriage. I was shell shocked.”
They exchanged their vows on May 22, 2015, at St. Anthony’s On the Creek in Lowell.
Martie had worried he thought they were on a date in the sushi restaurant and she had been slightly annoyed that he wanted to monopolize her time in the beginning. But
about a month into their relationship, she realized he was perfect for her.
“I really realized that for the first time I was going out with somebody who was very similar to me,” she says. “I always enjoyed his company and we always had great conversations.”
Scott says common interests make their life together fun.
“We found that we were just as comfortable laying around watching TV as going to something like the royal wedding,” he says. “I could literally say something about something that was interesting to me and she would be genuinely interested in it. And vice versa – except for sushi.” If you have an interesting howwe-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 425-7228 or email: