My fiance and I are getting married in two weeks time and I wanted to take a moment to share our love story and the path we took to get here. I am not doing so because we have a picture perfect tale. Rather our journey to one another was neither easy nor straight. It was about as far from the ideal I grew up believing in as could be, but I’ve come to understand that sometimes the most beautiful treasures in life are found in the most surprising of places.
We first met in the summer of 2009. My best friend had been killed the week before and his funeral had been the day prior. I had spent the past week unable to stop sobbing, unable to eat, sleep, or breathe. On the night that my fiance and I first met, my friends had gently coaxed me into leaving my apartment and going to a friend’s restaurant opening with them. I had no interest in doing so but managed to pull myself together enough to get out the door. These same friends knew my fiance through a mutual friend and, upon finding he was in town from Los Angeles, invited him and the girls he was with to come meet up with us.
I wish I had some story about falling in love at first sight when we met but my mind and heart were not remotely in a place to do so. Instead I remember talking to him about soccer (he worked for a team at the time) and trying to determine if we had any mutual acquaintances in my friends who played for Seattle’s team. He tells a similar story – there was not some magical moment shared between us. In fact he was there with a girl he was seeing at the time and I had a boyfriend.
At the end of 2009 I moved to San Diego with my boyfriend at the time and that boyfriend and my relationship continued to progress. Eventually we got engaged and began building the foundation of a life together. My now-fiance and I very casually stayed in touch after discovering that we had yet another mutual acquaintance. Still, we were in no position to spend time together as we were both involved with other people and he was constantly traveling the world for work. As time went on we began speaking more and more and our friendship grew. But it was just a friendship for many years. There was never a time when I realized I had unrequited feelings for him, nor does he claim to have had any for me.
As time went on my relationship with my then-fiance deteriorated as our college love ran its course. We broke up, got back together, broke up, and got back together again for years, unable to really let go of one another because we had, at that point, spent nearly a third of our lives together. Eventually I made the decision to walk away from the life we had built and start over on my own. That choice was one of the most gut-wrenching decisions I ever made because it meant leaving my entire world behind and going out into the unknown by myself. Around this same time my soon-to-be-husband was ending his own on again, off again relationship. We were suddenly able to spend more time together and, in the matter of months, we realized we were madly in love with one another. We promptly began rearranging our lives to fit one another and found ourselves living in, what can only be likened to, a fairy tale reality.
But we were not to live happily ever after just yet. We were still residing in separate cities and he was still spending 80% of his time traveling for his job. I had previously been involved with someone with a similar schedule and knew from experience that I was not able to handle that relationship reality long term, so we continued to reshape our lives. He left the job he had been at for seven years and began working towards developing a career much more home-based. I left the job I had been at for years in San Diego and moved to Los Angeles without a clue about how long it would take to find employment again, how I would pay bills in the meantime, or of what the future held for us.
From the outside I am sure it seemed that we were rushing into things and making gigantic mistakes, but we knew what we were doing all along. We knew in our hearts from the moment we first exchanged the words “I love you” that we were going to end up where we are today. There was, and is, no doubt in our minds. When people ask if I am nervous about getting married I am confused. Of course I’m not nervous. We made so many choices and changes to get to where we are today and to build this beautiful life that we have, how could I be nervous now? We made those so called sacrifices for one another without blinking an eye because we knew definitively that our love was worth it.
I share this because I feel like there are not as many stories about love that grows and love that you work for as there are about picture perfect scenarios. Love does not always announce itself and it does not always arrive in the form you expect. But just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there waiting until the time is right, patiently growing roots so that when you are ready for it, it is ready to blossom.
