So the truth is, I never meant to fall in love. Not in
happily-ever-after-till-death-do-us-part love, anyway. I had this idea, at the
ripe old age of 18, that a woman didn’t need marriage… didn’t need a man… didn’t
need any relationship that might stand in the way of a career and an exciting,
fun-filled live of travel and accomplishment. It’s funny how I still believe
that, yet I’m glad I found mine. Whatever the hurdles, the trial and error, the
ups and downs, I would spend the last 23 years the very same way if given the
chance.
I didn’t think of him as “the one” for several years.
Certainly not the summer we met. He was fun. He was new and exciting. With him,
I had a voice I was not accustomed to using, except perhaps at the tail end of
parties, when I was past drunk and still upright and the mood of adolescent
debauchery had turned philosophical. We talked about things; ideas that were
deep and wide and it was nice that it didn’t require an abundance of alcohol to
get myself to speak my thoughts out loud as words.
I liked that about him.
Being with him was a little bit like doing drugs… all of the
buzz, none of the day-after hangover.
I didn’t think of him as “the one” those first few years…
weekend drives between two colleges, countless letters written on spiral
notebook paper, our first apartment together in Lawrence… somewhere along the
line we decided to get married. I loved him. At least per my limited
understanding of love at the time. It seemed the practical thing to do, get
married. It assured our future together in some very real and tangible ways and
that somehow frightened me less than the idea of us growing in different
directions and eventually apart. We were moving forward, most definitely, as a
couple, rather than as two individuals who just happened to enjoy spending time
together.
I’m not even sure I thought of him as “the one” when we got
married on December 29, 1990. It was the coldest day in Dodge City, Kansas in
something like 50 years. I don’t remember much about the cold. Only that it is
the first thing people talked about for many years when they talked about our
wedding. Several family members did not make it to the event. It was that kind
of cold; the kind of where cars wouldn’t start and people were afraid of being
stranded, even for short road trips, because of the deepness of the chill.
The sky is blue in our wedding photographs. The ground is
white, but not freshly so. The oreos were stuck to the windshield of our car so
solidly that they required multiple blasts from a carwash hose on the way to
Wichita to clear the window enough that we could see. We added ice, but at
least we had visibility.
The whole experience of meeting him and falling in love and getting
married a short two and a half years later still feels like something of an
out-of-body experience for me. The wedding, especially; I was never a
center-stage kind of girl. I never dreamed of tiaras and princess gowns and
spotlights. I was still operating under the assumption that I should do what
was expected of me. I grew past that, eventually. We both did. And I have to
give him at least half the credit for what we’ve become.
Authentic. Real. Both perfect and imperfect in our
made-for-each-other ways. Yin and yang in some respects; oil and water in
others.
Ultimately, we have both grown stronger in our visions of
ourselves, both individually and together, and after 23 years the fact that we
are still speaking—still each other’s first choice for company and
entertainment— would seem to be a good sign.
Sometimes, looking back on my life with him, it feels more
like we blundered into a relationship and were just lucky it turned out to be a
good thing. We grew up together, in many ways. We had disagreements. We made
some mistakes. Hell, we are likely still making new ones.
More often I think of it in terms of what we deserve,
because we worked for it. Some days it came easy; some days it felt like a
never-ending chore, this act of living together in happiness and harmony.
Somewhere along the line—likely years after marrying him,
believe it or not—I decided he was “the one” and I guess he must have made that
decision, too. Perhaps earlier than me. I really couldn’t say for sure. But the
commitment that feels real and binding was made long after the
out-of-body-experience of the early years of our dating and eventual marriage
had taken place. My memories of us as a couple at some point grow more solid.
The fairy tale divisions that made up my understanding of a modern woman versus
my mother’s generation had blurred by then and I understood that we were building our own life to be what
we wanted it to be.
I was never one to dwell on doubts, but was always well aware
that I had choices. And the fact was that I kept choosing him, over and over
again. One might think that after 23 years it’s simply habit. But I think it is
not. It remains a choice. And I pick him again, to be “the one”… and only.
Let’s see where the next 23 years takes us, Bubs.
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