By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
October 10, 1999
Linda and Jeff Van Kley had seen each other around the office. She worked in marketing communications at CNA Insurance. He was an actuary.
They didn’t pay much attention to each other back in 1990. At 30, she wasn’t interested in a 21-year-old who had just graduated from college.
“His age was the main problem when I met him,” Linda says. “I mean, he was 21! I was thinking, `This won’t work.’ ”
But they had mutual friends who hung out together, and both enjoyed playing volleyball after work. So they hung out . . . as friends.
“We started dating about five years ago,” said Linda, now 39. “In all truthfulness, I was ready to be more serious and he wasn’t there yet. So we kind of stopped seeing each other pretty early on in our relationship.
“I said, `I can’t really do this.’ So we didn’t really talk for about a month. Then one night I came home and there was a message from him on my answering machine saying, `I need to talk to you.’ That’s never a good sign when a guy says that, so all I could think was, `Uh oh.’ ”
But the message turned out to be good news.
“I had gone home to Iowa to visit my family,” says Jeff, 31. “When you’re driving back and forth by yourself, you have hours to sit in the car and do nothing but think. I realized that Linda was the one for me.”
In June 1995, Jeff proposed. They married six months later.
“Luckily for me, Jeff wasn’t like I was at his age,” says Linda. “I wasn’t ready for this kind of serious relationship until I was in my 30s. He was a lot more mature at an earlier age. He knew what he wanted out of life.”
Two years ago, the couple moved from Chicago to Flossmoor. Now pregnant with their first child (due at the end of March), Linda works as a free-lance marketing consultant. Jeff is an assistant vice president at CNA.
Asked if she still gives thought to their age difference, Linda says, “Initially the age thing bothered me. I thought, `When I turn 40, he’ll be turning 30.’ . . . But now, the only time I think about it is when someone else brings it up.”
She says that the marriage of “Friends” star Courteney Cox, 35, to actor David Arquette, 27, helped put their relationship into perspective.
“I told Jeff, `See, we were ahead of our time,’ ” Linda says.
Laughing, she adds, “Of course, Brad Pitt didn’t come to our wedding.”
