B’s wedding was the venue for our first date, but she is more important to this story than that. She was a girl from N’s hometown. They had known each other since middle school and were very good friends. She is the type of woman who doesn’t suffer fools, and she was the one who made N confront his hang-ups regarding long distance dating and convince him to go with his gut.
(It also turns out that N and I did not live quite as far apart as he thought we did. Geography is not his strong suit;)
If not for B, I wouldn’t be married to this wonderful man or have this happy life. And yet, I’ve never thanked her for what she did. What could I say or do that could possibly repay her as she deserves?
I knew early on that N wanted to marry me. He is one of those rare “marrying men”. I had always thought that I didn’t want to get married. It turned out that I just didn’t want to get married to any of the men I had known or dated before N. In those early months of our courtship, when I thought about what it would be like to be N’s wife, I didn’t feel scared or annoyed or doomed. It made me deliriously happy; and that’s how I knew.
We dated for six months. Every other month he would drive up to my hometown, and every other month I would fly to him, as my car wasn't reliable enough to make the 600 mile trip. It wasn't ideal, but we made it work.
N actually asked my dad for permission to marry me. Perhaps an antiquated move, but I thought it was adorable. My stoic dad said, “Just don’t lead her away from the Church”. N didn’t; it was quite the reverse. I didn’t know it at the time but he was already thinking about converting at that point.
N proposed to me six months to the day after our first date on June 17, 2005. That was the first time I can remember crying from joy.
Everyone thought we were crazy. I had just turned 21, N was 22. We were both still in college had no income to speak of. Some of my extended family didn't even know I had been dating N, and when they got the news that I was engaged they were understandably taken aback. (Once more, "You're marrying who?" and "You met him where?")
We lived in different states for another six months, then I graduated from college and got an apartment in the city where he lived so I could get in a semester of my graduate work before the wedding. We got married on June 17, 2006, exactly a year after we were engaged. (If you are sensing the pattern, it's because N is a mathematician. He likes the number 17 because it is a prime number, only divisible by 1 and itself).
When we left our wedding reception, bound for a honeymoon in Querétaro where we first met, I asked N, “How in the world did we get here?” That a chance meeting between two foolish young adults living it up in a foreign country would result in a marriage, a good marriage, seemed improbably to the extreme—and yet it had worked out so perfectly that there must have been a plan for us.
This is my happiest story. It reminds me never to doubt God's love for me, and always open my heart to His plan.
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