I tried to explain to Dala earlier this morning when she brought up the subject, and I clumsily used the word "boring." Know how you know you married the right kind of person? When you accidentally diss your relationship and they're not even made because they know you didn't mean to. Anyhow . . . Way back before we got married, I was thinking about us and how I felt. I knew very easily that I was quite enamored with her, but more importantly, it was in a very calm way. There wasn't a sense of excitement to our relationship, though we did have and still do have quite a lot of fun together. It was more quiet and calm and comforting, like sitting beside a creek on a summer afternoon or staying in bed under the covers on a cold winter morning. There was no sense of urgency or uncertainty in our relationship or how I felt about her and I realized that there's something special and rare to that, to feeling deeply in love but at the same time completely calm, and I doubt I'd ever find something that firm with someone else. So, after that, I just knew what I should do.
This describes my own experience pretty well. For me the kicker was when I got pneumonia and she was the one that I looked to for comfort.
I didn't realize you guys were married, so congrats! I think that kind of calmness probably goes further.
This is timely. The wife and I celebrated nineteen years this weekend. Which is really weird to type out, let alone say... because I still feel like I’m about 28... despite being considerably older. I only knew my wife for two weeks before I proposed. I just knew. It was a spiritual experience meeting her. Time slowed down. I just knew.
Our first anniversary is in 3 days, and we've spent some time reflecting on what that year has meant to us. I think this question is probably better answered by people who have been married longer than we, but maybe our nearness to that decision lends a type of clarity as well. My wife understands me in a way that I'm not sure anyone else has, and she picked up on me from the get-go. The first time we spent any meaningful face-time together was the first (and last) time I took psychedelics. It was a strange genesis but incredibly meaningful. Her patience and warmth during that episode was a comfort I had longed for. We were close, following that, but it was difficult for me to articulate the feelings I had for her and so we grew apart. We now know that neither of us stopped thinking of the other during that time apart, but in the moment it felt so isolating to have lost such a depth of communicative understanding. We both dated and had some meaningful growth as individuals, but the partners we were with were not people we could commit to. We reconnected, gently at first. I remember feeling like the bud of our relationship was so fragile. We spent long nights for several weeks, unpacking everything we had felt before, determining that we could grow what we had seen originally. We wanted that bud to be stronger. Our trust deepened, and over the course of several months I felt an urgency to commit to her. Our love deepened, and I stopped being able to imagine living without her. I told her, and we began planning our life. Over the course of those years, this woman placed her trust in me - her odds on bet that out of every person in this world I would treat her best; I've done the same. Her trust is strength, and when I realized that I realized I could marry her.
She made me want to stop looking. Bear in mind, I'd known my wife for fifteen years by the time we were married, and had been living with her for six years prior to getting hitched. Between meeting her and dating her there were a couple dozen women for me and she dated this dude, married him and divorced him so it's not like we were fated or anything. When we finally did get together, I didn't see anything about her that could be beaten. It was like "this chick is damn near perfect." There was a seminal moment where I told her this, qualifying it with something like "the only thing I'd change is your taste in music." She came back with MY taste in music? I can turn on the radio and hear stuff I like. You're the one that has to special order bizarre clanky howly stuff from German labels nobody has ever heard of. I'm not the problem, YOU ARE. I laughed. She listens to Norah Jones. I listen to stuff she hates. We've been together for fifteen years.