utter randomonium

This week’s WoW prompt is True Love, perhaps the subject most written about.  Below is my experience with it.

About a month after moving to the Northern Virginia area, I decided I was tired of having no friends so I did what I do best: I went online. I’ve met loads of folks online over the years, both awesome and, er, less so. I used to say that I’m a walking statistic, but I’m careful. Anyway, I went on Friendster, where people are connected by friends-of-friends (-of-friends-of-friends-of…), and I found this dude, some four or five degrees of separation from me, who looked kind of interesting. We had similar taste in music and movies, and I decided maybe I’d try somebody who liked things I actually liked, rather than things I wish I liked. Sure, I think mountain climbing is cool in theory, but let’s be honest here: I wouldn’t be able to keep up with somebody who counts it as one of their primary interests.

Side note, so this makes sense for those of you playing along at home: I have found that I really don’t enjoy being around people who share my interests. Just go with me for a second. See, I’ve found that the people who share my interests tend to have pretty much no other interests. The sorts of things I like – writing, science fiction and fantasy, drawing, SCA, theater, cats, etc. – tend to be Sole Fixations for a lot of people who also like them. I find I can’t relate to someone whose life revolves around a single hobby, so actually seeking out someone who shared my interests was a big change for me. (Granted, I’ve now met plenty of folks who both share my hobbies and a variety of others, but at the time it was trending in the opposite direction.)

Now, please note that I was looking for friends. By this point in my life I was quite happily determined to be a terminal bachelor. I told said dude (whose name is Bill, by the by) this directly. (Not that this is always effective; during grad school I was broken up with by two guys I had no idea I was dating.) He agreed, saying he had no interest in dating anyone either.

A quick timeline: I sent the initial email on a Wednesday in July, we talked on the phone on Thursday, and we decided to meet in person on Friday. I drove up to Maryland (which made sense, given the traffic situation) and we had dinner and talked. And talked and talked and talked. We ultimately ended up spending the entire weekend together, and every weekend thereafter until getting an apartment together in May of the next year. I remember quite clearly, when I lay down on his bed that first night, that it felt like I’d done it a hundred times before. I can’t explain that.

The weird part was that there wasn’t any giddiness, no initial crush, no anxiety. We just sort of fell into step with one another. By the time we finally got around to getting engaged it was almost a formality. I commented at one point that it was sort of like how there are plenty of other perfectly good chairs out there, but I suddenly didn’t feel like sitting anywhere else. It wasn’t a passion, just a quiet certainty.

And it’s something I could never have understood prior to meeting Bill. As I am so fond of telling people, you can’t really judge your future relationships by your past ones; after all, it only works out once. They say you just know when you’ve found The One, and that was certainly true for me. Somehow I just knew that I was done looking. The trouble, of course, is that while you may know when it’s right, it’s very difficult to tell when it’s wrong. It also doesn’t help that everyone’s different. For me there were no butterflies; for some there still are even after a decade together. It’s a comfort thing: I know I can tell Bill absolutely anything, that I don’t have to hold back or censor myself. He’s my very best friend, which magazines tell me I’m not supposed to require in a husband, but I was lucky enough to get it. We’ve been married four years and together almost seven, and we still like nothing more than to just hang out together.

So is it True Love? I don’t know.

But I think so.