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You Love Eighteen Years and What Do You Get?

Speaking of romance yesterday…

I returned from my writing hiatus just a smidgen too late to catch an interesting personal milestone. The timing, she was never my forte.

Still, better late than never. So I’m happy to report that today (if it were three weeks ago), my wife and I have been together for exactly eighteen years.

(And three weeks. Unless you moved today three weeks backwards up there when I suggested it. In which case, it’s exactly eighteen years. But now you’re three weeks behind the rest of us.

And now you know how I felt in calculus class in high school.)

“Is it any wonder our love has survived to ‘Barely Legal!’ age?”

We haven’t been married for all that time, of course — though we’ve reached a dozen years and change on that calendar, too. But it was on November 13th, 1990 when the two of us first really talked, the sparks flew, and the rest is history.

(‘Sparks flew’. ‘Beer was consumed.’ ‘Hormones throbbed.’ Call it what you like.

See, I was taking the poetic high road. But here you come, with your boozy talk and your throbbing hormones. Fine.

And now you know how I felt during every moment spent outside calculus class in high school.)

Actually, there’s a small point of order to be made about the actual date from which our dating began. Though the night we began chatting was the 13th, it wasn’t until after midnight that we arranged our first actual date. And the 13th that year was a Friday, so my wife likes to use Saturday the 14th as our ‘go time’.

At least, she used to. I always assumed it was because she didn’t want some karmic disaster — seven years of bad luck, perhaps? — to befall her for embarking on a romance on Friday the 13th. But she’s been stuck with me for eighteen years, now. So either her little timekeeping trick isn’t working, or that disaster was bigger than she realized.

Maybe she used to tear the leaves off of clover as a kid. Or stand under ladders spilling salt on black cats. How the hell should I know?

Personally, I like Friday the 13th better. It makes us seem badass — like we’re beating the odds, laughing in the face of fate, walking our own rickety little love bridge across the Gorge of Eternal Peril.

Or like we’re vampires. That’s cool, too. What’s not badass about vampires?

At any rate, when we returned home the other night and counted up the rings on our anniversary tree, it struck us both just how long we’d been together. Which we expressed in our own, ah, particular ways. As usual.

My wife, poetic soul that she is, took a slow sip of wine, stared into my eyes, and said:

‘You know, if our love was a person, it would be an adult now. It could get married itself, and vote in elections and head off to college to begin all new adventures.‘

Hey, I like a good love analogy as much as the next doe-eyed old Romeo. So I jumped in to help.

‘Oh, yeah, our love would rock as a teenager. He’d have a kick-ass fake ID, and a sweet sports car, and he’d have totally banged a cheerleader by now.‘

Yep, that’s me. The incurable romantic. Is it any wonder our love has survived to ‘Barely Legal!’ age?

I just wish that on one of these damned anniversaries, I wouldn’t have to sleep on the couch.