An exhilarating ride, from friendship to love and more

My wife was the first real woman I ever met. I was an 18-year-old high schooler interning at a university newspaper while she was 21, a student, a photographer and an incarnation of the species I had not yet encountered.

Which is to say she blew my doors off, in that explosive, revelatory way that is mostly exhilarating — yet somewhat overwhelming. She was smart, funny and had thoughtful ideas, a perspective on things that was altogether new. She was able to reframe how I looked at women and therefore, in no small way, at existence itself.

She was also smokin’ hot. This was a luscious and mindbending combination for an 18year-old man-child and I was smitten. I spent those first few months trying to foster a relationship, one that she was not particularly interested in. Three years’ difference in age, at that time of life, can represent an eternity in maturity.

And so a friendship formed. I was, at first, a novelty, a kid sucking up this seemingly grown up environment through a straw with the size and force of a garden hose. But in time, as we listened and thought and talked, we came to enjoy each other’s company, finding common ground in both the fun and dysfunctional sides of ourselves.

Time passes. She goes one way and I another, connected more tenuously by the occasional party and late-night phone call. We become the person you can trust in a pinch, a friend with history, knowledge and understanding, the gap of infrequent contact closed in moments of familiar intimacy.

And then a visit, spontaneous and on unfamiliar territory. Our friendship explodes into something passionate and spectacular, fuelled by a New Year’s of such decadent excess and joy that it shall exist forever in the pantheon of greatest days. In the aftermath, we spend our time talking about a vision for our lives, all the easy freedoms of friendship still in place. Barriers have long since dropped away between us and hard conversations are, now, if not easy, then easier.

Geography prevented a slow transition — it was all or nothing. So, she gambled that the life we would build together was a life more wonderful than the one she would leave behind. It added, if not pressure, then at least an air of expectation.

Bumps were inevitable. Using that foundation of friendship we talked through them, not as lovers but as friends finding new ground. As scholars in each other’s personal and family history, patterns were more easily discernible, the pitfalls of the past avoided with more grace.

A year after that magical New Year’s, a ring was offered and accepted. Two years later, the first child arrived and then a second. There was a crosscountry move, changes in career, personal triumph and tragedy: an ongoing saga not particularly unique, but a narrative that’s ours and ours alone.

Next week marks 19 years since our wedding day. A significant date, to be sure, evidence of commitment and perseverance and love.

But the friendship will soon enter its fourth decade and though there is no date to mark its initiation — no clichéd “the first time I saw her” remembrance — it provides the true moment of beginning. Without friendship, there is no relationship, or it doesn’t last or it just isn’t what it needs to be. In good times and bad, the friendship is what we fall back on.

So many things have changed in the intervening years, but the really true things have not. She’s still the first real woman I ever met, and now the only person I really trust. She is the only person I will ever truly love, an initial passion that evolved into something more expansive and meaningful, warmed by the passage of time.

Happy anniversary, my love.