Their shared love of Elvis Costello sealed the deal
Jenny Armstrong found Ben Boulden in a city she had lived in and left, through his roommate whom she had talked with but had not met.
Jenny had moved from Fort Smith to Little Rock in 2003 following the dissolution of a brief-and-doomed-from-the-start marriage.
“A friend who had moved away asked me to join Friendster because she was an introvert and needed help making friends in another city,” Jenny says. “I did that for her and then I didn’t use it very much.”
Friendster was not technically a dating site, but there were profiles and there was an option to filter for singles. It was there that Jenny stumbled upon the profile of a guy from Fort Smith who had similar tastes in movies and books.
“We talked back and forth a couple of times, and then he said, ‘You really need to message my roommate,’” she says. His roommate was Ben. “We had so many disparate things in common that I thought my friend might be catfishing me,” Ben says. “In music it was Iris DeMent, the Ramones. … Jenny and I are both very media-centric, and so we pay attention to art, music and literature, and having those things in common was nice. We can talk politics and disagree and I have strong opinions there, but if I find out someone didn’t like the ‘Godfather’ or ‘Star Wars,’ I’m like, ‘You’re completely dead to me.’ She had a lot of those sorts of signifiers in her profile and I was like, ‘Well, this is someone worth talking to.’”
Jenny and Ben moved from messaging to phone calls and emails. Ben is an early riser, and he often sent missives in the early hours. Jenny prefers to sleep later, but she would wake up just to see if he had written.
“By the time he came down to visit, I was really excited about him, and I felt fairly sure he was going to be a strong candidate for ‘the one,’” she says. “I went all out. I got my hair cut, I think I got new contacts, I got my teeth whitened, I cleaned my house top to bottom.”
Their first date was dinner at Star of India and then Sticky Fingerz, where they noticed a painting of Elvis Costello bordered by lyrics from “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.”
“While we were there that song came on and we were like, ‘Well, that’s cool,’” Jenny says.
They heard the song in the car later, and on their second date, on Halloween, they went to a party where someone turned on a latenight talk show featuring Elvis Costello, performing that same song. “Peace, Love and Understanding” was released in 1974.
“Ben told me he loved me for the first time on Christmas Day, and then on St. Patrick’s Day he proposed at an Elvis Costello concert in Tulsa,” she says.
Ben’s proposal was a surprise to Jenny, who told him moments before about an offer she had gotten for a job in Dallas.
“I already had the ring and I decided she deserved to have all the information before she made any kind of decision,” he says.
Ben had written to Elvis Costello’s manager, requesting that Costello play “She,” which he had been listening to after a weekend visit with Jenny when he made the decision to propose.
He did not hear back, but felt certain “Peace, Love and Understanding” would be part of the set and he would propose then.
“I think he played it during the encore,” Ben says. “I popped the question and she looked very happy but she didn’t actually say yes, so at one point, within a minute or two of proposing, I said, ‘You did say ‘yes,’ right? You do agree to marry me?’”
She did.
They had their picture taken with Elvis Costello at a meet-and-greet for superfans after the concert, and on the drive home, they listened to a mixtape Ben’s roommate had made for them in celebration of the occasion. It included music by Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and more.
Ben and Jenny were married on Nov. 24, 2005 — Thanksgiving Day — in an informal ceremony attended by their families. Jenny’s father, Roger Armstrong, was then minister at Western Hills United Methodist Church, and he performed the ceremony.
Jenny dressed up, but everyone else stayed comfy in jeans and sweaters. Guests brought Thanksgiving dishes and her parents made extras of their favorites, and after the ceremony they all sat down for a traditional Thanksgiving meal.
As newlyweds they lived in Fort Smith, where Ben wrote a column, Inquire Within, for the Southwest Times Record and completed a compilation of those columns in a book, “Hidden History of Fort Smith.”
The Bouldens later moved to Little Rock. Ben is the internal communications manager at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Jenny works in corporate marketing at Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
Marriage takes work, of course, but Jenny is certain she made the right decision about Ben.
“If you marry a person you most love being around,” she says, “most of the work is already done.”