Patrick Wilson called Leigh Ann Ferguson by name and flippantly said he didn't like anything about her. He didn't mean it. It was a joke, a trademark of his quirky sense of humor, but Leigh Ann didn't find it funny.
The joke, it turned out, was on him -- he likes almost everything about her.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “I was really annoyed.”
He says: “I thought she was cute — and she was a brunette, and I always had a thing for brunettes.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I was totally happy and completely calm until right before the ceremony started.”
He says: “To me it was just perfect. Even getting dressed before, it was the perfect friends saying the perfect jokes, doing the perfect things.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “You definitely have to put the relationship in the top thing because if it’s not a priority then it just slowly slips away.”
He says: “You just have to pick right. Yes, we work at it and yes we’re compromising and yes we’re sacrificing but so much of it comes easy because we just picked good.”
Patrick was in middle management at an Olive Garden restaurant in Fayetteville in 2006. Leigh Ann was a hostess at the restaurant. She wasn't feeling well on the Sunday morning when Patrick unlocked the door to let her in and greeted her with his joke. But it was Father's Day, and her boss would not let her call in sick.
"I didn't realize she was sick," he says. "I was 23, and I just thought I was so funny."
Leigh Ann didn't respond.
"I just blew straight past him," she says. "It was the first time he had ever spoken to me, and I had been there maybe a month."
Patrick realized his attempt at a joke fell flat and spent the rest of the day trying to apologize. Leigh Ann, who had laryngitis -- though Patrick didn't know that -- gave him the silent treatment.
"I wasn't crushing on her by any means. I just felt like a jerk. I thought I was being funny. I could tell it was the wrong thing to say, and I just felt awful as a human."
They didn't talk much after that, but Leigh Ann had been watching Patrick and decided she liked him -- and his sense of humor -- after all.
One Friday night, one of her friends called him and asked what he was doing. He had loose plans to hang out with his neighbors, but the girl on the phone invited herself over and brought two friends with her -- one of them was Leigh Ann.
"That's what kind of started it," he says.
The next night Patrick and Leigh Ann went to a party with some of their co-workers.
"He told me that night that he was going to call me the next day and ask me out on a proper date," she says. "I was like, whatever, he's not going to call. But I was at lunch with a friend the next day, and I looked down at my phone and saw he was calling."
He asked her to dinner the following Tuesday, and she accepted. But he had to reschedule.
"I was low on funds," he says. "I ended up picking up to-go shifts, which allowed me to get tips and tables as well."
They went out the following Saturday, for dinner at Hugo's on the Square and then saw Beerfest in the theater, and they did it on a budget.
Leigh Ann was working on her undergraduate degree. Patrick was on hiatus when they started dating in September and resumed classes in January.
A week after they went to dinner, they went to lunch and since they finished before it was time for her to go to her next class they got drinks and went to Wilson Park to sit on the swings and talk.
"When he dropped me off at school, my mom called me and was like, 'Oh, how did it go?'" she says. "I was like, 'He's the one.' She's like, 'Oh, Leigh Ann, you can't say that.'"
Leigh Ann insisted she just knew.
"We had what I would consider an old fashioned courtship, for the most part," Patrick says. "I was constantly passing her notes and drawing pictures at work, and I would slide them to the servers to go take them to her at the host stand."
He sometimes surprised her with flowers when he picked her up after class, too.
"He was very sweet," she says. "He still is."
Patrick had seen several guys propose marriage over dinner at Olive Garden had no intention of joining their ranks.
Leigh Ann was helping him move in March 2009, and he steered her toward an empty room he had decorated with flowers and streamers. The ring was on the floor, with a message: "Will you be my penguin?"
"Penguins mate for life, so that was always our thing -- will you be my penguin," Leigh Ann says.
Tears started flowing.
"She was crying -- I was getting impatient waiting for her to say yes," Patrick says.
They exchanged their vows on May 30, 2009, at the Fayetteville Town Center, and they honeymooned in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, during the height of the H1N1 flu outbreak.
Patrick finished his undergraduate degree the same month they married, and the following spring he was offered a promotion with the restaurant. He and Leigh Ann, who had completed her master's degree by then, moved to Paragould.
In 2015, they moved to Little Rock. Patrick is a teacher in the Little Rock School District. Leigh Ann is a social worker with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Their daughter, Lillian, is 8.
Patrick's sense of humor has persisted through the years.
"The only thing I would change about my wife," he says, "is the fact that she doesn't like Arby's."
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High Profile on 03/29/2020