(Cover by Nicholas Cardy, all rights to current holder. My wedding wasn’t this awesome, but it was still one of the high points of my life).
So Saturday TYG and I celebrated our fifth anniversary—well wedding anniversary, we’ve been together eight years now. As usual we went out to dinner at the local vegetarian restaurant, Sage, and snuggled a lot, so it wasn’t spectacular, but it was quite joyful (i.e., our usual). I got her a subscription to National Geographic History Magazine; she’s getting me a set of hourglass timers for tea (3, 4 and 5 minutes).
So the day itself wasn’t much to blog about, but it did get me thinking, as I often do, about how much a wild, chancy thing our relationship was (I know I’ve blogged about this before so if it sounds familiar, my apologies).
We were both sick the weekend before we met at the Mensa gathering in Denver. She might not have attended; I might have spent the whole time up in my room.
If I’d come down to the hospitality area earlier, or later, I might not have seen her reading and thought to strike up a conversation. It wasn’t the first or only time we ran into each other, but it was the one that made the biggest impression.
If I’d tried flirting it might not have gone well—TYG mentioned later she wasn’t looking to hook up with anyone (particularly not someone 15 years older and living a thousand miles away) so she might have turned me down, in which case I’d have been unlikely to do it again.
If she hadn’t contacted me on LinkedIn afterwards (I screwed up, as I so often used to do, and didn’t get contact information), we wouldn’t have been in touch until the following year’s national gathering, instead of being an established couple).
And there were a couple of awkward moments where if one of us had said the wrong thing, it could all have gone higgledy-piggledy.
But none of those things happened, and now we’re the absurdly happy and slightly crazy couple we are.
As I know I’ve said before, none of this proves that love wins out, or that if you “put yourself out there” etc., etc., you’ll find someone. It’s not a just world: we can do everything right and still fail, still lose, through no fault of our own.
But it does show the possibility of winning may exist, even when we don’t think so. Because at that point I don’t think so.
And I’d like to believe that when two people do find each other, the world does get a little more just. Love is blind. Justice is blind. So logically speaking, love must be justice.
