Erin Napier Recalls Moment She Fell In Love With Husband Ben
HGTV star Erin Napier has been taking a trip down memory lane as she celebrates 20 years of knowing her husband, Ben Napier.
The Home Town host took to her Instagram page on Sunday, December 8, to mark the 20th anniversary of the day she met her future husband. “December 8, 2004. As of yesterday I’ve been with @scotsman.co most of my life. That’s a crazy milestone,” she wrote.
In the post, Erin shared the story of how she and Ben met and spent a whirlwind 24 hours together. The couple met in 2004 and got married in 2008 before going on to have two daughters, Helen and Mae. Helen was born in January 2018, followed by Mae in May 2021.
“On the day we met, I had been on some dates with a guy I worked with at the hospital pharmacy — let’s call him Charlie,” Erin shared. “And I was dating him because he looked a little bit like Ben Napier, this guy I had a crush on.”
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She went on to say she spent the night at Charlie’s house watching Mystic River but “kept getting texts from Ben, whom I’d only finally really met that day. He was offering to see me the next day so he could check the brakes on my Volkswagen because I’d told him that afternoon, a car guy, they’d been making a weird sound.”
“I did not care about my brakes at all, reader,” Erin continued. “I wanted him to lean against my car in the dorm parking lot and tell me about himself while he easily ignored the other girls who would pass by and whisper ‘What is he doing with her?’”
Erin explained that she and Ben arranged to meet up to check the car after “the photoshoot of him for the yearbook,” but she found out that he’d also been texting her friend Kristen “all night too.”
“And I felt so washed out — I guess he was a flirt who made every girl feel this way, that I had imagined being special to him for one perfect day,” she added.
Erin described the Jones County Junior College yearbook photoshoot, which saw Ben posing by a lake with a Labrador puppy in his arms and a pipe in his mouth. “He looked like Robert Goulet on SNL,” she wrote.
“Afterward, in the yearbook room while we were editing photos, he came and sat beside me soaking wet from the lake in the hard molded plastic and metal chair at my desk,” Erin explained. “My heart filled. At one point once we were alone, while I was interviewing him, he leaned in closer to me — he smelled so nice — and I noticed how exactly straight his teeth were.”
She continued, “My heart raced now because he tilted his head as if he would kiss me and I wanted him so badly. He came half a inch closer and was answering the question I had asked him quietly and I knew this was it and then he stopped. He grinned and said ‘You were gonna let me kiss you.’”
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“I denied it obviously, because you can’t fall in love and kiss someone 12 hours after meeting them can you?” Erin added. “He leaned back in his chair and we finished the interview and he said ‘I’m going to change clothes and then let’s go for a drive.’”
In a follow-up post, Erin described how they drived for hours listening to music before stopping off at a Sonic to get something to eat. They then spent the afternoon at the house Ben and his buddies rented at the edge of campus and “talked for hours about our families, our past relationships.”
When she got back to her dorm later that night, Erin said her phone lit up with a call from Ben and they whispered into the early hours so as not to wake Erin’s roommate Kristen. “As it turns out, he had been texting her questions about me,” she explained.
The rest, as they say, is history.
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