Washingtonpost news updates: On Love: Marina Meyerson and Sam Hoffberger

Sunday, January 15, 2012

On Love: Marina Meyerson and Sam Hoffberger

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On Love: Marina Meyerson and Sam Hoffberger

View Photo Gallery — ‘We’re patient with each other, which I think is a good thing’:?Marina Meyerson was late to her first three dates with Sam Hoffberger. Good thing he is patient.

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by?Ellen McCarthy

By spring 2009, Sam Hoffberger had been on countless second and third dates. Some were comically bad, where it seemed as if there’d been a personality change since the first meeting. Other connections just fizzled, seemingly without reason.

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But Hoffberger, a drummer who studied history and music in college and now works at a family insurance business, had high hopes for Marina Meyerson.

He’d met the dark-haired beauty, who has only the slightest trace of an accent from 10 years growing up in Belarus, at a party in Baltimore filled with former students from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she’d studied graphic design. Hoffberger and Meyerson chatted for a just few minutes, but he acted quickly enough to get her number.

Hoffberger, a devoted road biker who rides more than 3,000 miles a year, took it as a good sign that Meyerson suggested they meet for dinner at a Federal Hill restaurant named The Bicycle.

Then she didn’t show. Meyerson texted to say she’d be 20 minutes late, but when 40 minutes passed and his waitress asked for the third time whether anyone was joining him, he began to worry.

Meyerson finally walked in and found Hoffberger looking “like he was gonna kill me,” she recalls. But when the waitress returned, they both ordered the same dish — tuna tartare — and Hoffberger said, “See, I told you she was worth the wait.”

The conversation flowed easily, but when Hoffberger, who cops to a tendency for awkwardness, walked Meyerson to her car and tried to go for the kiss, she took a step back every time he moved in, until they’d circled her vehicle.

Still, by the time he got home, there was a text from her, thanking him for the good time. They decided to meet up two days later, but this time Meyerson was nearly three hours late. (A dye job at the salon had gone wrong and needed immediate repair.) It was after 11 p.m. by the time they arrived at a local diner, and when it closed, they adjourned to the stoop, where they talked until 5 a.m.

When she was delayed for their third date, he said with resignation: “I guess I’m gonna have to get used to this. You’re always going to be late.”

“But it wasn’t like, ‘You have to change yourself.’ Or, ‘You have to do this,’?” she says. “It was like, ‘Oh, he’s serious. He’ll wait for me, regardless.’?”

Hoffberger realized he was hooked when he found himself inviting Meyerson, a Yankees fan, to watch the Orioles-Yankees game with him. Hoffberger knew that his grandfather, who’d been a part owner of the Orioles, would “roll over in his grave” at the prospect. But in that moment, he didn’t care.

“There was this immediate sense that when I was with her, everything was a little bit better than when I wasn’t,” he says.

They began seeing each other regularly. In June, they traveled to New York so Hoffberger could meet Meyerson’s sister, and then to Boston, where she could meet his best friend.

“I have a tendency to date crazy people,” he says. “So it was basically like, ‘Is it okay to keep doing this?’ If not, cut the cord.”

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