On The Day We Met...

On the day I met my husband, I told my best friend, “I’m going to marry that guy.”

I had absolutely no reason to believe that was true.

It was 2001, and we were at my best friend’s family’s annual pig roast. She and her then-boyfriend had been together since they were 14, and somewhere along the way, he had run into an old friend named J and invited him to the party.

And then J walked in.

For the first time in a long time, I felt the wall I had built around my heart start to shake a little.

The more I talked to him that night, the more the mortar crumbled. A brick here. Another one there.

There wasn’t some grand, movie-worthy moment. No music swelling in the background. No slow-motion glance across a crowded room.

In fact, he had a girlfriend.

She even came to the party for a while that night - and, inconveniently for me, she was delightful. Kind and funny and completely impossible to dislike. 

Still, somewhere inside me was this ridiculous, unwavering belief:

Someday, I was going to marry him.

He wasn't my type. He didn't look like the usual boys I dated. But something about him just made everything click.

I had made a lot of bad decisions in the year before I met J. My heart had taken some hits, some deserved and some not, and I had gotten pretty good at protecting it. And by protecting it, I mean shutting people out. Not allowing anyone outside my friends to get close. I didn't even let people hug me.

But J felt safe.

He felt like home.

And I hadn’t felt at home with anyone in a very long time.

The craziest part was that he was barely even my friend yet.

Over the next year, he became part of our little group we called the Goof Troop. We hung out constantly. Sometimes his girlfriend came along, and as much as part of me wanted to be miserable about that, I couldn’t be. I genuinely liked her.

So I did nothing.

I had fallen hard for him, but he was in a relationship, and I wasn’t about to be the person who interfered with that. I kept my feelings to myself and settled into being his friend.

One of his best friends, actually.

My mom loved him, too, which certainly didn’t help my cause.

Then one day, he and his girlfriend broke up. Nothing dramatic. No huge betrayal or explosive ending. Just two people whose lives were ultimately headed in different directions.

And over the next few months, I finally started letting J know how I felt.

Eventually, he asked me out.

And after spending all that time convinced I was going to marry this man, I did the obvious thing.

I panicked and said no.

Suddenly, the idea of something real terrified me. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe friendship was safer. Maybe I had been wrong all along.

Or maybe, somewhere deep down, I didn’t believe I deserved something real.

Eventually, I worked up every ounce of courage I had and wrote him a letter.

That night, the Goof Troop met at the bowling alley for some late-night bowling. Afterward, I asked J to meet me by my car.

I handed him the letter.

Then I kissed him.

For the record, he did not kiss me back. Mortifying.

In his defense, the poor guy was probably completely confused considering he had asked me out and I had turned him down.

And because apparently handing someone a letter confessing your feelings and then kissing them without warning wasn’t dramatic enough, I immediately left so he couldn’t read it in front of me.

I have absolutely no idea what that letter said anymore.

What I do remember is the panic afterward.

Because somewhere along the way, J had become one of my best friends. And wanting something more meant risking what we already had. What if we tried and it didn’t work? What if we lost our friendship? What if it changed the whole group? What if everything became awkward? 

What if I had just ruined one of the best things in my life?

I honestly can’t remember exactly how we got from that letter to actually being together.

I do know that at some point, I ended up at his house watching a really, really bad subtitled ninja movie.

And somewhere between the pig roast, the bowling alley, the unanswered kiss and the terrible ninja movie, the guy I told my best friend I was going to marry became mine.

Twenty-four years later, here we are.

We’ve had beautiful years and hard ones. We’ve laughed until we couldn’t breathe and argued about things that don’t matter anymore. We’ve built a home, raised a family, changed, grown, screwed up, forgiven each other and kept choosing one another.

Our love story has never been a rom-com.

It definitely wouldn’t make a very good Hallmark movie.

There was no perfect meet-cute. No sweeping declaration. No straight line from the pig roast to happily ever after.

There was a girlfriend I really liked, a girl who was too scared to say yes, a letter I can’t remember, a kiss that wasn’t returned and a truly terrible ninja movie.

But it’s ours.

And somewhere along the way, the man who first made me feel safe became the man who taught me something even more important.

Back then, I wasn’t sure I deserved something real.

Twenty-four years later, I know exactly what it feels like to be loved.

And if someone handed me the remote and asked if I wanted to watch our story all over again - from the very beginning, bad ninja movie and all - 

I’d press play every single time.