Lauren Thomas woke up the Friday before Christmas, hungover.
The night before, Lauren and her group of best friends in Austin, Texas, had emptied the last of her wine cabinet. Polishing off the large collection had become a summer 2008 project that rolled into the fall.
Now it was December 2008, the wine cabinet was officially emptied, and Lauren was feeling the aftereffects.
Lauren dragged herself out of bed, made herself a coffee, fed her beloved German Shepherd, Fenway, and headed to the neighboring golf course for a morning game. Golfing was Lauren’s favorite pastime — even the day after several glasses of wine.
Lauren was single. She is gay and at that time had dated a lot of women, but nothing ever seemed to stick. Her golfing friends teased her that her love life was a “disaster zone.” But Lauren was content with her independent, single, friend-filled life.
“I had pretty much stopped looking for a relationship,” Lauren tells CNN Travel today.
That Saturday morning, Lauren didn’t bother washing up the empty wine glasses or cleaning up before golfing. She spent the morning clearing out her cobwebs on the golf course before wishing the golfing crew a Merry Christmas and heading home.
The next day, Lauren was due to head to her mother’s house for the Christmas break — with a quick work trip en route. She couldn’t bring Fenway with her, so she’d engaged a house sitter, whom she was about to meet for the first time.
The person Lauren had employed for Christmas was more or less a stranger. At that time, back in 2008, Lauren traveled a lot for work. She was almost never home. Fenway “could be difficult” and Lauren was, as she puts it today, “burning through house sitters.”
It was always tricky over the holidays, too. Most people seemed to have plans with family and friends, and didn’t want to spend the holidays with a large, lovable-but-fierce German shepherd.
Sure enough, the day before Lauren’s Friday night wine gathering, her go-to house sitter had called, cancelling at the last minute.
“I was left high and dry trying to find a dog sitter,” recalls Lauren. “But I told a peer at work and she said she had someone who could sit for me. She would have her stop by Saturday.”
Lauren didn’t know much about this woman, other than that she was also an Austin resident, loved dogs and was available over the holidays.
“So, when I got home from golfing Saturday, the house sitter was on her way. I jumped in the shower and really wasn’t concerned about my appearance so threw on a ratty pair of shorts, a t-shirt and no shoes,” recalls Lauren. “Then the doorbell rang.”
Lauren opened the door. On her front step was a woman, holding a notepad, probably a similar age to Lauren, in her mid to late 40s. Dressed in a hooded jacket and Converse tennis shoes. Smiling. Lauren was instantly bowled over.
“I opened the door to a ‘wow moment,’” recalls Lauren today. “I was enamored immediately.”
“I’m Shelley,” said the woman, holding out her hand for Lauren to shake. “Shelley Couch.”
Shelley Couch was a relative newbie to Austin that December.
“I’d had a long and rather grueling career in IT, and at the time, I said, ‘That’s it. I need to make a change.’ I relocated to Austin, Texas from Utah, and I’d been there probably close to a year, exploring other opportunities,” Shelley tells CNN Travel today.
Like Lauren, Shelley is gay. Back in 2008, she’d had a few relationships, but nothing long term. She enjoyed her independence, and had settled into Austin life, cultivating a “nice circle of friends” and enjoying various hobbies.
“I was very solid in my single life,” says Shelley.
Shelley was set to spend the holidays solo in Austin: “I didn’t have any family,” she explains.
But a holiday season solo wasn’t a daunting prospect for Shelley. She enjoyed her solitude.
“But when a mutual friend came to me and said, ‘I’ve got a friend going out of town who is in desperate need of a pet sitter, and I’m wondering if you might be available for her,’ I said, ‘Why not? I’m doing nothing else. I don’t have plans to spend Christmas with anyone.’”
Christmas with a large German shepherd sounded like fun to Shelley. She’d never looked after someone’s pet before, but she was an organized, neat animal-lover. It seemed like a good fit.
“And so, she gave me Lauren’s address and a day and time, and I drove over. I had my pad and my pen, and I was all business, and that’s how I walked up to her door and knocked.”
“I opened the door to a ‘wow moment.’ I was enamored immediately.”
Lauren Thomas on the moment she met Shelley Couch
While Lauren was instantly bowled over by Shelley, Shelley remained “business minded at this point.”
“I was completely not in the mindset at all of looking at other people as attractive or not attractive,” she says. “This, for me, was purely a gig at this point.”
Still, Shelley enjoyed meeting Lauren’s rambunctious German Shepherd.
“Fenway immediately gravitated to her,” recalls Lauren.
As Shelley took notes, jotting down Fenway’s feeding times and habits, Lauren showed her around the house, trying to hide how flustered she was by Shelley’s presence.
She immediately regretted having drunk all the wine the night before, as now she couldn’t offer Shelley a festive drink as an excuse to keep her in the house a little longer.
“She had no wine, she’d drunk all of her wine,” says Shelley, laughing. “So I just basically took copious notes and then I left that evening, went home, prepared to show up and do my job.”
The next day, Lauren left for Florida, first to her work trip and then onto her mother’s house for Christmas. She tried to be present, but her mind kept drifting back to Texas.
“I’m thinking of my house sitter and what she’s doing… I couldn’t stop thinking about her.”
Meanwhile, Lauren’s sister, her husband and two kids were also visiting Florida for the Christmas season. They’d driven down from New Hampshire, and Lauren’s brother-in-law had come down with a horrible flu-like bug en route.
“She’s pulling over on 95 to let him throw up out the window,” says Lauren.
Her brother-in-law turned up still sick — sneezing, coughing and spluttering. Lauren really didn’t want to catch anything, so she tried to stay away from him as much as possible. It wasn’t an ideal Christmas situation.
“I was laying on the bed in the guest bedroom, texting and on Facebook, and saying ‘I’d rather be home with my house sitter,’” says Lauren.
In 2008, posting your slightly-rambling, slightly-incoherent thoughts as cryptic Facebook statuses was commonplace social media etiquette. So Lauren, trying to dodge the flu and daydreaming about Shelley, wrote a couple of statuses along these lines, more for the entertainment of her golfing friends than anything else.
“And everybody’s like, ‘What’s the house sitter?’” recalls Lauren.
Back in Lauren’s house in Austin, Shelley had “no idea” about these social media posts.
“Meanwhile, I’m walking the dog and cleaning the house,” she recalls. “It was a really cold winter that year, and the dog was bigger than me, but we fell in love.”
Shelley got to know Fenway the dog very well. And she picked up more than a few things about Lauren from living in her house for two weeks.
It was obvious, Shelley thought, that Lauren was work-focused and likely spent “very little time there, that it was a place mostly for her to perch.” There was nothing in the fridge, and there wasn’t a lot of food in the cupboards. There were piles of unwashed laundry, which Shelley decided to do on Lauren’s behalf.
She guessed, too, that Lauren was single.
“I didn’t see any other people’s clothing or goods or anything, so I didn’t snoop, but it was clearly a one-person home.”
Shelley sent Lauren regular texts with updates on Fenway. On Christmas Day, Shelley and Fenway “went on a lovely, big walk.” When she got home, she saw a sweet text from Lauren wishing her “Merry Christmas.”
As for Lauren, despite her best efforts to hide away from her brother-in-law, she ended the holiday season feverish and coughing.
“He got my sister sick, he got the kids sick, and then I was sick, and then my mother got sick the next day,” says Lauren. “And at that point, I told Shelley.”
Lauren didn’t want to infect the house sitter and figured Shelley would scarper, leaving the keys under the doormat, at the news. But Shelley immediately started prepping the house for Lauren’s return.
“I thought the only proper thing I could do was get some soup and crackers and Gatorade drinks to help her out during this period of time,” says Shelley. “I knew she had no food in the house, because I’d stayed there for two weeks.”
When Lauren came home and realized what Shelley had done for her, her crush on her house sitter only intensified. And over the next week, Shelley kept popping round to check on Lauren.
“I did go over, and that’s kind of how we got on a more personal basis,” says Shelley. “Although she was deathly ill at the time, the flu or something.”
“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this woman’s come over to my house while I’m sick to bring me soup. Yeah, she’s a keeper,’” says Lauren.
Shelley didn’t quite know why she wanted to help Lauren. At the time, she didn’t let herself admit that she “obviously wouldn’t have done that for just anyone.”
She was going above and beyond the role of house sitter, that was for sure.
“I’m a nurturer, and really saw a need in her,” says Shelley. “And I just thought she was a really respected professional, very attractive…”
The new year rolled around. Lauren was finally over the flu. As January got into gear, she reached out and invited Shelley out a few times. It seemed obvious, to Lauren, that there was something between them worth exploring.
“But for me, a phone at that time was a communication device. For Shelley, it was like a piece of jewelry. She never answered text messages for three or four days,” says Lauren. “So I’m like, ‘This woman is totally not interested in me.’”
It wasn’t quite as black and white as that. For one, Shelley was genuinely bad at texting. And yes, she did like Lauren. She was beginning to realize her feelings, but Shelley wasn’t sure if she was looking for a relationship.
“I’m doing well on this path, maybe I’ll just stay on it,” Shelley recalls thinking. “She’s very attractive, she’s smart… but maybe I’ll just stay on this path.”
She could also tell Lauren was “ready for a real commitment” and she wasn’t sure if she was.
“You have to take that very seriously,” says Shelley today. “You don’t want to really hurt someone’s heart.”
But Lauren was unperturbed by Shelley’s aloofness. Ever since Shelley turned up at her front door, notepad in hand, Lauren was certain: “We’re going to date. “
“I mean, from the minute she left the house, I’m on the plane thinking about her. I’m at work thinking about her. I have to drive four hours to my mother’s house from Pompano Beach, thinking about her, and I’m like, ‘This woman’s gonna date me.’”
Still, as January turned into February and Shelley remained hard-to-pin-down, Lauren decided they were heading into “last chance” territory.
So she reached out to Shelley one Saturday, proposing a spontaneous movie. Shelley replied, suggesting “Slumdog Millionaire,” which had just hit theaters.
“In Austin, there’s this movie theater that they’ve taken out every other row and put in tables, and you can watch a movie, drinking, eating food, and so we went there,” says Lauren.
“It’s a lovely movie,” says Shelley. “And, you know, we got a little more friendly, just arms touching and whatnot. And then she asked me out for dinner, and we did that, and still we weren’t a couple…”
Lauren and Shelley were now dating — in theory. Neither of them named aloud what was happening, even as they went out for dinners together and spent long evenings deep in conversation.
After one such evening, Lauren phoned Shelley and asked her outright: “Do you want to be a couple?”
On the other end of the line, Shelley hesitated.
“I said, ‘I’m just not sure that I want to commit. I may just want to stay single and date,’” Shelley recalls today. “And Lauren said, ‘I’ll respect that. But I just want you to know that I honestly believe it’ll be the biggest mistake in your life.’
And that just stunned me. I’m on the phone, and I was quiet for a bit. I said, ‘Can you give me 24 hours?’”
Shelley hung up the phone and sat totally still for a while, reeling.
“I really thought long and hard about it. And I thought, you know, ‘She’s right. I think she’s right.’ And we’ve been together ever since.”
After this slower start, Lauren and Shelley settled into life together quickly. They went on daily jogs together — Shelley smiling as Lauren sang along, badly, along to the music blaring through her headphones.
“We seemed to enjoy the same type of things, the same movies…” says Lauren.
“Back then, we were golfing, we were partying and whatnot,” says Shelley.
And of course Lauren’s dog Fenway was thrilled when Shelley became a regular at Lauren’s house.
“Fenway had this thing where he would lay over me at night. Her dog just wanted to protect me or something, and so I wake up and 120-pound Fenway would be laying across me,” says Shelley, laughing. “I loved him, he was great.”
The golfing crew also loved Shelley, who started joining Lauren on her Saturday golf games.
“All my friends fell in love with her,” says Shelley. “All my family fell in love with her. There wasn’t a single person in my life that didn’t think Shelley was great. Her and my mom had a really good, really good connection and were close.”
By the time Christmas 2009 rolled around, Lauren and Shelley were firmly established as a couple. That year, Lauren didn’t go back to Florida. Instead, she and Shelley spent the holidays in the house that had brought them together, Fenway by their side.
Shelley found herself thinking how the previous Christmas she’d been there alone, not knowing that she’d met her person. It seemed hard to fathom, how much had changed since last Christmas.
Over the next few years, Shelley and Lauren navigated life’s ups and downs together — relocating to Maryland when Lauren’s job moved her there, and later moving to Delaware.
“I think we probably knew that someday we would get married, but we didn’t get married straight off when it became legal in our state,” says Shelley.
But in the years after gay marriage became legal across the US in 2015, Shelley began considering proposing to Lauren.
The couple spent Christmas 2017 serving food to people at a homeless shelter. As Shelley watched Lauren at work, charming everyone she spoke to, she thought to herself: “We need to make this forever.”
Later in the day, the two were alone in the kitchen together.
“Shelley sat on my lap after we got everybody fed, and we were cleaning up, and she said, ‘Will you marry me?’” recalls Lauren.
“She said, ‘Yes,’” says Shelley. “And then we just did it.”
The couple enjoyed a small, intimate wedding the following September 2018, with just their best friends present.
“We had met a really special couple, a lesbian couple who had been together over 50 years, who were our next door neighbors,” explains Shelley. “One of the neighbors, Jenny, got her license to be able to marry us…”
“We got married next door at Jenny and Bobby’s house,” says Lauren. “They were much older than us, and they met at college, and back then, they went through the ringer, with flattened tires, beaten up…that kind of stuff.”
“They blazed the trail in America,” says Shelley. “They were part of that era that really blazed the trail. We were really honored to know them and love them, and we still love Jenny, Bobby has passed now.”
Today, Lauren and Shelley, who are now in their 60s, have found themselves — in turn — becoming mentor figures for younger folks in the LGBTQ+ community, and advisers for straight friends too.
“A couple of them have trans children, and they’ve all come to us numerous times to seek counsel and resources and things like that. So it’s a real pleasure to be able to be in that place now that we can help a little bit,” says Shelley.
In the almost two decades since Shelley and Lauren first met, the couple say they’ve grown together as their lives have taken different, exciting directions.
“We took another road about six years ago and decided we would move to the country and be organic farmers,” says Shelley. “We’re beekeepers. We’ve been very lucky, our lives, our common interests have grown together and expanded.”
Fenway has sadly passed away, but he lived a long and happy life. Today, Shelley and Lauren are parents to “a herd of French bulldogs.” They love all their animals, but the couple always remember Fenway fondly, and credit him for bringing them together.
“It’s very happenstance to me,” Shelley says of the way she and Lauren met. “I don’t know many people that fall in love with their dog sitter.”
It’s a story they always enjoy reliving, especially around Christmastime.
“We remind each other, ‘Hey, we met about this time of year. This is what we were doing back then,’” says Shelley.
Even today, new people in their lives always “crack up,” when they hear the story for the first time, adds Shelley.
“They’re laughing,” she says, “They think it’s amazing.”
“It’s very happenstance to me. I don’t know many people that fall in love with their dog sitter.”
Shelley Couch
For years, Lauren’s coworkers joked that the story could give single folks everywhere the wrong impression.
“Every time that I’d tell the story of how Shelley and I met, they’d say, ‘Stop. Don’t tell your story. Because we keep telling our single friends they’ve got to get out of their house. They gotta go out. The next relationship in your life is not coming to your door…’” says Lauren, laughing.
When they met in 2008, both Shelley and Lauren thought they were on a certain path. They were in their late 40s, but have since lived out a whole lifetime of new experiences together.
Lauren suggests their story illustrates that people shouldn’t “settle for something in your 20s just because.”
“And if we’d met earlier in life, I’m not sure what would have happened. I think because we met older, you’re so much more willing to have dialogue, through contention,” adds Lauren.
Shelley agrees that their story emphasizes the importance of living life “to the fullest.”
“And never, never think that you’re too old for anything, or that something isn’t possible at any age,” she adds. “I mean, who would have thought we would be beekeepers and have a little micro farm… surrounded by birds and bees and trees and everything we love? It’s a great way to spend our decades now, out here in the calm, the peace, the beauty.”
“When I look back, I just see immense gratitude. And I often think of just how interesting it is that your life can take just one slight turn and you get to experience all of this stuff that you may not have.”
