Tomorrow is Superman’s birthday!
A lot of people ask me how the two of us met.
I usually answer quickly. It seems pretty straightforward: We met in high school.
But then everyone kind of recoils, aghast. High school? Really? That’s amazing. Sometimes they don’t say “amazing.” Sometimes they say things like “outrageous,” “unbelievable,” “unheard of,” and (my personal favorite) “no way.”
I’m getting sort of used to it, now that we have one foot in our second decade of being married, but it makes me think about the story in general. And I guess it is sort of strange. In this day when a lot of people don’t pass their seventh year of marriage, I guess it is pretty hard to believe you could stay in love with someone you knew as a teenager.
The people who find the story most unthinkable keep adding questions: “Haven’t you changed so much?” And I think, yeah. Of course. But we’ve changed together, I guess. And we’ve helped each other change. And we’ve watched each other change. That part seems so important to me, actually, to be in love – to know how the other person’s changed (from what to what). I find it odd to think of meeting someone in his 30s and thinking you can be in love with this person whose past you will never truly know, because you weren’t there. So the cocked head and disbelief go both ways, I guess.
Anyway, one of the stranger parts of my and Chris’ story – at least to me – is the fact that I never wrote it down. Continue reading