"i want to be your wife" i said to him tonight, as we were relaxing before dinner. "i already consider you my wife" was his response. it will be five years next month that we've shared. he's my best friend, confidante, companion. we respect each other, support each other, help each other, love each other, and live together as a couple. i heard somewhere years ago (dr. laura? oprah?) that a couple should be together 10 years before getting married. after my mistake of a marriage years ago, and the ridiculous amount of years of my life wasted with complete jerks, i finally decided to give up on men for "a year" and do some soul searching. so, as i was beginning to realize who i was, what i wanted out of life and out of a partner, i inserted the 10 year rule into my modus vivendi.
and then we met.
when i looked into his eyes for the first time, i said to myself "wow, there's someone real behind those eyes - this is someone i want to get to know better". unfortunately, there were two very large roadblocks. the first being that i was taking a year off from relationships! the second, he was the resident manager at my new apartment complex. after my year was complete, i thought to myself "well, i've made it this far, i've accomplished a lot in my quest for change in my life, why not go another year"? so i started my second year off. i actually made it about six or eight months. i even learned a little bit more about myself during that time. my abilities, my strengths, my weaknesses. and how to recognize bullshit. i really learned how to do that! (finally! after so many years!) but then, i found myself thinking about him more, taking him a piece of pizza when he was working on the broken sprinklers late in the afternoons, and even teaching him how to work a computer more than just as a word processor. i was ready to start dating again. i wanted to date him. i couldn't find a way to tell him though!
our community group was planning a "fourth of july" party. (i hate calling it that. it's independence day for the love of christmas!) we planned out the barbeque, bingo, kid's activities, and the fireworks. when it came to decorations, we decided we wanted lights - like christmas lights dangling from the trees, spread across the walkways above people, just as magical as we could make it with our budget in low-income apartment living. i had a string of white lights about a hundred feet long, and he was willing to help us. when he set up the rickety ladder and scurried up into the tree, i was scared he was going to fall! here he was, the man of my dreams, i've purposefully waited a year and a half to even think about letting any man into my life, re-teaching myself what kind of person i really was and what i wanted from a partner and what i had to give, and here he was, the man of my dreams, teetering between the tree branches, ready to die before i could even tell him i was interested in him. so, as i was holding the ladder, i just instinctively reached up to hold his leg, as if i owned the rights to it or something.
eight days later, after our resident meeting, we all sang him happy birthday and presented him with a cake. i didn't know it at the time, but he had spent those eight days trying to figure out how to approach me (and whether or not it was ok with him being the manager and i, a resident)! four days later, after a few long nights on the phone (how did that late-evening maintenance call turn into a three-hour conversation, anyway?), i finally asked him "when are we going to go out"? he said "how about now?" and the rest, they say, is history.
