By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
October 24, 1999
If it hadn’t been for a pair of dead Walkman batteries, Michelle and Peter Warman might never have gotten married.
At least that’s the way Michelle’s father tells it.
“I’d like to think that there’s more to our relationship than that,” Michelle, 29, says with a laugh. “But maybe he’s on to something.”
Wed two months ago, Michelle and Peter lived in the same apartment building downtown. Both worked out in the building’s exercise room – Michelle with her headphones on, and Peter waiting for her to turn her Walkman off so he could approach her.
This went on for months. Finally, in August 1996, he got his chance.
“She walked in not wearing headphones,” says Peter, 32. “I’m sitting there on the exercise bike all nervous, thinking, `What do I do?’ Because I had to do something. I got up the courage to approach her. We talked for about 10 minutes, and I finally asked her if she’d be interested in going to dinner with me.”
She says, “There I was all sweaty and disgusting with dirty hair and no makeup on. I’m thinking, `Why does anyone want to pick me up?’ I didn’t think he’d call and didn’t really think about it. But then he called me two days later and left such a sweet message on my answering machine.
“He said, `Hi, this is Peter, and I met you in the gym the other day. I’m just calling to follow up on my invitation to take you out to dinner.’ It was such a gentlemanly way to behave, especially compared to the stuff I had heard from some other men.”
They went out on a Saturday. On Sunday, Peter called Michelle to make plans for the following week. They decided to have dinner on Monday.
“Well, what’re you doing now?” he asked her.
“I’m just watching MTV,” she said. “Do you want to come down and watch with me?”
They dated like this for 15 months. She had her apartment, which was full of her monkey collection (“Some people like cats and dogs; I love monkeys!” she says), and he had his.
“It was great,” Michelle recalls. “We’d each get ready for work in our own apartments. He had his space and I had mine. If everyone could date like we did, it’d be great.”
Then in May 1998, Peter took Michelle to one of their favorite spots: the monkey cages at the Lincoln Park Zoo.
“I remember thinking that morning that it was going to rain, and I didn’t really want to go,” Michelle says. “But he was pretty insistent. When we got there, he said, `I have something for you.’ And I was like, `You got me Twizzlers?’ Then he started fiddling around and I’m like, `Ohmigod!’ ”
He proposed to her.
“I wanted to ask her at some place that would mean something special to us,” Peter says. “And so it all made sense to do it there.”
The couple got married in August and honeymooned in Europe. One of the highlights, Michelle says, was checking out the Danish simians at the Copenhagen Zoo.
