People often comment how cute it is that I met my husband in middle school. They sometimes fold someone new into the conversation and say, “Did you know they met in 6th grade!?” I usually make a self-deprecating joke about how boring we are and try to move things along. But the follow-up question always comes: “Have you been together since then?”
The truth is, I remember the moment I met him, in a Midwestern school cafeteria. He was a new kid standing against a wall. He was from California. He has no memory of that event. But I had a gut reaction to him, like I already knew him or something.
I spent a lot of afternoons at his house in middle school. We were mostly friends. We played Horse. We threw balls back and forth. Tennis balls, baseballs, squishy little basketballs. I picked him to be my partner for an extra credit math assignment about calculating velocity which seemed unfair because we both knew he was going to do the whole thing. He had a Tiger Woods poster over his bed. Sometimes we kissed. Sometimes we talked on the phone and could hear the same train in the background pass in the distance beyond our backyards.
We got older and started to look different. He buzzed his hair and got contacts when we started high school. He wore oversized polos. He had a butter yellow one that he wore with baggy jeans. I think it’s still in his closet because he doesn’t like to part with his stuff. I went to boarding school in Massachusetts and he didn’t. He wrote his name on the inside cover of my journal and then, “Don’t forget me.”
I heard he had a girlfriend. Whatever.
One summer, between junior and senior year, he called to say his parents were out of town and he was having a party. At the time he had a girlie-girlfriend who rode horses, someone we both knew. Whatever. His friend overheard him on the phone and asked who I was. “Don’t touch her,” he said.
At the party his best friend was all over me. He gave me his number. Wrote it down on a piece of paper and handed it to me outside my car. I saved it in my red Nokia phone.
We were at the same parties a lot that summer. I was with his best friend. He was with that girl we both knew. He found me a lot at those parties on driveways. He pretended he wanted to smoke cigarettes so he could hang out with me. I have no idea what we talked about on those driveways but I remember the humidity, and the feeling of being warm outside at night with him. He always looked at me like, I’ll blow it all up right now if you want me to.
The next summer he was single. I was not. Until I was. But I was headed to college in California and I wanted to be free.
He called me a month later on September 11th, “Are you OK?” he asked me. He had a new girlfriend at his college. I had tickets to Modest Mouse. “Yeah, I’m OK.”
I wasn’t really that OK. I was wrapped into crowd that revolved around the club scene in Los Angeles. Falcon. Deluxe on Tuesdays. The Belmont on Wednesdays. Ivar. The Standard. I was barely making it through school. I was rudderless. I thought about him more and more and more. I thought about him in tanning beds. I thought about him while driving to babysitting jobs. Every single song was about him. I sent him CDs in the mail. CDs that are now in our attic somewhere. We were friends.
Then, sometime in 2004, he came to visit me in L.A. over President’s Weekend that happened to be Valentine’s Day too. Or maybe it was the other way around. We tried to act like adults. Dinner at Les Deux. Real date stuff. Outfits. We decided to be together, to go for it. He wanted to be tethered. I needed to be tethered.
That Valentine’s Day was when we started consistently putting in the reps. He moved to L.A., I graduated college and moved in to his one bedroom apartment in a classic courtyard building just off Melrose with a fountain in the middle. There was no A/C and no laundry but we thought it was everything. He worked New York hours. I worked at a magazine. We found a dog on the 110 freeway and she moved in too.
We learned how to fight, but that took years. Exchanging ideas that are emotionally charged without sucker punching, without competition, that unfortunately takes reps to get it remotely close to right. Still working on it.
One night in December after we had been together for four or five years, I got up in the middle of the night to pee. It was probably midnight or one. It was dark when I returned to the bedroom, since we were sleeping, but he was standing up near the foot of the bed. A dark figure. He started talking to me but I don’t remember anything he said because I was confused. Why was he talking to me? Then we both sat on the floor. It was still dark and fuzzy but he asked me to marry him while we were both sitting criss-cross applesauce. He said he was planning on asking during the day but the timing never felt right. I understood, it’s too bald a thing to also have sunlight on your face. I appreciated the cover of night and being barely awake. I appreciated that he gave me a funny story to tell.
What came next wasn’t a dramatic, essay-worthy narrative arc that could be optioned by an exec at UTA (damn it). I know there’s supposed to be conflict here. A rupture. A reinvention. Something where we change.
It was just more life. Moves, friends, jobs, babies, another dog.
I’ve learned one major fact of life at 43, and it is—very unfortunately—that most everything comes down to reps. You show up over and over and over again if you want to get where you’re trying to go.
As life fills in, squeezing in the reps becomes more deliberate. Everything bifurcates like tree branches—career, marriage, children, logistics. Time splinters. Long Sundays on the couch, listening to music and reading, compress into a four-second look across the kitchen with eyes bugged out as if to say, What the fuck did we do here?
We’ve had ups and downs. Good luck and bad luck. But mostly we’re just two people willing to show up even when it’s monotonous—to make it work, to make it fun, to decide what to have for dinner, and to feel it all.
We met in 6th grade, it’s all pretty boring, but I still feel like like those kids on the driveway.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
has so much; middle school cafeterias, humid driveways, red Nokia numbers, CDs mailed across the country “putting in the reps.” great emotional hinge “He always looked at me like, I’ll blow it all up right now if you want me to,” and you're still those kids standing in the driveway.
Not boring, beautiful.