How I Met My Husband, in 2,000 Words and Four Memes

An ode to the guy I live with, the person who helped me become a real partner and a parent—how we found each other, and how marriage, even the best ones, is a gamble.

It’s almost Father’s Day, which naturally has me thinking about my own late father as well as the father I spend nearly every day with, my partner Kevin. I’m not really a fan of the word husband, I don’t know why, it just feels incredibly traditional and like I inadvertently bought into something without exactly reading the fine print. That’s kind of what marriage is, though: a crapshoot. And tbh, I’m not even sure I wanted to ever be married if it weren’t for something that happened about four years into our relationship.

While they might have been genuinely good, well-meaning people, the majority of the men I dated before I met my husband were…mostly jerks. To me, at least. I’m sure each of them, the ones that left a mark, might agree. No hard feelings, of course (it took a few decades to say that, btw). The truth is, I was never a great dater, frequently falling too hard too fast or just never getting the pacing right (red flags were my specialty). If there was a mistake to be made in the first three months of a relationship, I made it, or sat by while someone else made it for me. I was almost five or six years out of a relationship that didn’t even last a year that completely shattered me. And no matter how hard I tried to be okay, to be over it, I couldn’t shake this feeling that it had broken something in me. In lieu of recovering, it was easier to believe I was better off alone…something I’d become quite excellent at. And then, one day, I was visiting my sister at her office for lunch, and she asked if I had been out on any decent dates, and I said no, which was the truth. And then she asked me with zero judgment: “Do you want a relationship?” I was floored…how could she say such a thing? “Of course I do!” I snapped at her. “Why would you ask me that?”

“Because you don’t really act like you do,” she said.

I took the train home and thought about what she said. I was pissed. But really, why? Because as much as I hated to admit it, she was right. I almost never dated, and acted like this when anyone showed even the slightest interest in me. So, against my better judgment, I tried online dating, an old site called Nerve, which no longer exists. Because I was scared and very, very comfortable in my tiny studio apartment doing almost everything solo, I kicked the “adventure” off with a 10-date challenge—just 10 dates, and if I wanted to shut it down after that, well, at least I would know I tried. No harm, no foul. (I just deleted two whole paragraphs of hellish memories that came careening back from those early dates. Because ultimately, you don’t need to hear them and I do not need to remember them.) 

Fast forward, though, to date number 10. You think it’s Kevin, right? 

Wrong.