17 Years Ago…

My entire world changed when I married my best friend.

It’s not the fairy tale romance novel that many folks have…it does not have us living happily ever after but what it does give us is the best life either of us could have ever imagined.

We no longer have photos to share or friends and family to share those moments with us but what we have is in our hearts and those memories are clear as if we are actually looking at the photos or reminiscing with someone who was there.

We had both been in several dysfunctional relationships, Jerry was even married once before but I was waiting for “the one” before I married but that didn’t stop me from having one bad relationship after another.  I was going through a two year period of celibacy, trying to understand why I continued to make the worse choices in men and decided to be friends before even starting an intimate relationship with any man when I met Jerry.

We became friends and would hang out together and with others for over a year before one day in June he asked me to go to the lake with the “guys” but as his date.  We drove to the lake together in my convertible and we talked and laughed and had a great day.  Things went badly wrong throughout the day within our group of friends that we both just made the best of and continued to have a fabulous time in spite of all the drama.  Our ride home together was even more about us getting closer to one another with our talking and laughter.  I dropped him off and he kissed me on the cheek and we both agreed to have another date soon and we did.  We dated for almost a month before we decided to go for a midnight swim in my pool and that is where our first kiss happened.  Under the star filled sky, under the diving board I can still feel the sparks that were ignited with that first kiss. 

Many of our dates consisted of us taking road trips, we would drive someplace for a day and just hang out.  There was so much of Arizona we had not seen that together we wanted to share it all.  Our friendship was growing stronger every date and when he proposed after only 6 months it felt right so we set the date for January 18, 1997.

To say we lived happily ever after would be such a crock…two weeks before the wedding everything began to crumble but as we did on our first date, we pulled together and worked it all out.  Our friendship carried us through so many difficult times and this was one of them.

Was there dysfunction?  Oh, hell yes!  We were of course still living the life that neither of us wanted but believed was the American Dream…a house, vehicles, our own company and working 24/7 to keep up the appearances.  We began making some major changes in our lives that would finally lead us to the life we so wanted to live, together exploring this wonderful country of ours.  But those changes cost us a lot, it cost us many of our friends and family but we could not continue to live a life that was not our authentic lives.

We both had a dream and that dream mirrored one another and we both knew we would have some really tough times getting out of all that dysfunction, but our friendship did and continues to get us through it all.  If we never made the decision to begin living our dream we would not have seen all the wonderful places and met the great people we have met in these past 10 years.  Life does not always turn out exactly as you plan it but if you live the life you love then all things will come to you in time.