On Keeping It Real

OK, so since TwistedMe gave me a topic--true love, I guess that’ll be my next item, and also as sort of an apology to my husband for what he considers “excessive disclosure” in my last post!

Sometime during the Spring of 1992 I looked across the college commons at a guy slouched in a chair opposite me reading a paperback. I experienced a fleeting regret and I thought to myself, “Now there’s a guy I’ll never really get to know.”

Flash forward to November 23rd, 1996. I’m walking down the aisle in St. Patrick’s Church in Woodbury, NJ, with said guy.

In between there were several years of first tentative correspondence, then friendship, then courtship. By the time we made that walk we’d known each other 8 years, done triple the required marriage preparation voluntarily, and made a conscious decision not to live together until after the wedding.

Did we sail into the sunset of holy Catholic married bliss in which we did everything we were supposed to do and showered sunshiny happiness on all and sundry?

Hell, no.

For one thing, he inherited a craptastic amount of debt courtesy of yours truly’s idiocy in college. For another, I was working on a raging ball of anxiety/depression that was speeding toward a need, however temporary, for medication. We were too broke to have more than one car, he didn’t have a job yet, our apartment was smaller than my last college dorm room and was furnished with castoffs and a refrigerator from the Nixon administration that shed suspicious silver-gray flakes when I defrosted it with an icepick. I found out that when it comes to organization, bill paying, and housekeeping I am a lazy jerk. I found out that little crises seem to crackle in an orbit around His Nibs and we have had everything from small car accidents (once, two in a 48 hour period) to spontaneous combustion of our stove that resulted in a full alert response from the Thorndale Fire Department. For nine years we’ve been one paycheck away from disaster.

But here’s what we did have. He is for me. That’s the best way to explain it. He was, is, and always will be for me. Foreordained, intended, dumb luck, however you want to say it happened, he is for me. There is a space in this existence of mine that he fits into and when he is not here everything is off. I don’t even breathe right. He isn’t my best friend. A best friend is someone you complain about your boobs to and buy shoes with. He is the other part of myself that I didn’t know I was missing.

Neither of us is perfect, its not about that. We don’t stand around gawping at each other in gooney bliss. He is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I know this even when he’s criticizing my driving or broadcasting popcorn over a seven-foot radius of the movie-watching chair. Small prices to pay to be with someone with a kind heart, a keen wit, and an omnivorous desire to experience life. I couldn’t ask for much more.