It wasn’t love at first sight. My college roommate was the one who was looking for a date at that time, not me. But I do remember meeting the guy who later turned out to be Husband. “He was cute,” I said pointedly to Roommate after she chatted with the guy in passing, then introduced me to him as a biology classmate of hers.
“Too short,” she sighed.
Her loss. I married that guy 15 years ago today, and what a wonderful ride it has been.
I remember a newsroom discussion not long ago on whether you know “The One” when you meet that person. Gotta say I didn’t. I didn’t that day on campus, and I didn’t when we started dating, and I didn’t even when we decided to move in together two years later.
I distinctly remember unpacking some of his bachelor-pad stuff, like a colander we still have, and wondering whether I should keep it all together so it would be easier to find it when, you know, we broke up.
Not that I was expecting to break up, necessarily, it’s just, well, often people do. Even people in their 20s who are serious enough to move in. Didn’t want starry eyes clouding my RealityVision.
We even got engaged before I decided he was “The One.” I don’t mean I said “yes” without meaning it; I loved him and was very happy about the idea of marriage. But I still hadn’t fully committed to the idea, something I didn’t realize until we had a major blowup about eight months later. (Side note: We were engaged for a year and a half. He proposed on my birthday, which is in December, but I wanted an outdoor wedding, which in this part of the world almost mandates summer, but that particular upcoming summer I knew I had a huge special section to produce as editor of the paper where I then worked and there was no way I could juggle that and a wedding. The things I do for this job.) So there we were, eight months into our engagement, in the middle of a knock-down-drag-out over, of all things, whether I believed he was really ready to get married. To me, that is. He kept insisting that he was. I kept hearing, “Well, this seems like a good time in my life and you’ll do.”
That wasn’t good enough, I told him. If he wasn’t absolutely sure I was “The One,” then what on earth were we going to do if we promised our lives to each other and then “The One” came along?
We stopped the argument before resolving it. He went to bed. I stayed in the living room, determined to end it. Not Good Enough. Not Settling. Done. I took off the ring.
In the morning, he got up and ready for work while I stayed on the couch, miserable. That’s when he came out and told me he didn’t know what I thought he’d said, but what he really meant was that he did want to get married, to me specifically, forever. And, he added, it sounded to him like I was the one who was hedging against a breakup.
And, I suddenly realized with perfect clarity, I was. I had been dumped before and I was too busy trying to guard my emotions against it happening again to really believe – or invest in – a marriage.
It took almost a physical effort on my part, but at that moment I resolved I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I was going to quit thinking about breakups, quit planning for breakups, even subconsciously. I was going to commit everything I had to this person. And, I told myself, if there should come a day when that no longer works, I will trust that I will have the strength to handle the situation when it comes. And until then, I decided, I’m not going to think about it anymore.
And I haven’t.
That was the day I found “The One.” Not because I finally realized that’s who I’d been dating all this time, but because I made the almost painful mental shift to decide that that’s who he was going to be.
Fifteen years, two kids and countless arguments, differences of opinion, apologies and makeups later, that is who he is to me still.