My simple answer is the same as katliamom’s, except substitute Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. I never felt head-over-heels, pop-song love for another adult, but that’s exactly what I felt about my children. I used to sing the Turtles’ “You, Baby” and the Temptations’ “The Way You Do The Things You Do” to them, and meant every word.
With my wife, I have an overcomplicated answer, because we don’t even agree about when we met. I don’t think either of us had a specific moment when we knew “this is the one,” although I think we both felt “this could be the one” very early on, even before we got together. It took us a long time to do that, and then it took us a long time to be permanent. That happened slowly, by accretion, the result of a lot of work and a few key decisions. Getting married, though, was really just confirmation of a fait accompli for the benefit of our parents and the children we might have someday.
We were sort of a college couple, in that we met and became friends in college. But we were never a couple in college – our social circles barely overlapped, and spent their time very differently, which was part of why it took us a long time to become a couple. I loved large, drunken parties with lots of flirting and dancing; she thought more than six or seven people in the same room was too many, and hated it when people couldn’t talk in normal voices because someone was playing music too loud. It turned out later that she loved to dance, but she didn’t know that at the time. Many of her friends were lesbians, and she struggled with thinking that maybe her radical feminism meant that she should look to women for romantic fulfillment, too. Her heterosexuality was somewhat theoretical, anyway – she hadn’t had any kind of romantic relationship with a man for a couple of years. I was an intellectual preppie for whom literature was everything, but who had a very romantic notion of immersing himself in the world and its commerce. She was a hardcore social activist who was all about correcting social injustice one hammer blow at a time. She was also something of a BMOC – a leader of the women’s caucus and the political left, with lots of meetings to attend and committees to sit on. She used almost all of her free time to study – she had gone to a bad high school, and always felt she had to work twice as hard as anyone else just to keep her head above water. (Her head was, in fact, way above water – junior Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude above water – but for a long time she had me convinced that she was barely avoiding failure in all of her courses. Which was true only if you understood that by “failure” she meant anything less than a 4.0.)
When we finally got together, she told me she had no idea I had been trying to court her for a year and a half. Years later, though, when the letters she had sent her parents from college turned up in our house with the rest of her mother’s knicknacks, I learned that she knew darn well I was courting her, and had made a decision to keep me at some distance, which she fretted about a lot in her letters. We had lots of talks, mainly about ideas, and occasional lunch or dinner dates. Once I got her to go to the movies with me and some others of her friends, but then she bailed at the last minute. We traded books.
I was smitten right away, when (as I recall it) I sat down to lunch with one of my friends and his girlfriend, and the future most important woman in my life was friendly with the girlfriend and sitting with them. She was serious and intense, and spoke a mile a minute; she was not conventionally pretty, but had striking blue eyes with dark hair and a cute figure under her politically correct dumpy clothes. But I got smitten a lot. I had crushes of varying magnitudes and durations on at least four other women at the time, any one of whom could have wrapped me around her finger by liking me just a little more. And I got pursued by women, too. There were a lot of fish in the sea. I figured someday someone I liked enough would like me back enough, and hopefully I would get over my ambivalence and egotism enough to make it work. Which is pretty much what happened. (Experience had taught me I was much better at getting girls to like me than I was at being a boyfriend.)
Anyway, shortly before I graduated, and we were never going to see one another again, we had a last talk, during which I said “It’s no secret that I’ve had a massive crush on you since we met,” and she said “It’s not entirely unreciprocated,” and we talked about how we were sad about the circumstances that had kept us from getting involved, but each content with and proud of the lives we had that generated those circumstances, etc. And kissed goodbye forever. About a month later, on an island a few hundred miles from where she was, I got a letter from her proposing that we spend a weekend alone together, away from any of our previous haunts. So we did. And five minutes into the date it was clear this was a big deal.
Over the next year, however, we were able to spend a total of maybe 20 days together. Most of the time we were 3,000 miles apart. We wrote a lot of letters – at least a couple a week. I didn’t completely stop falling in love with other women I met, but the standard was much higher, and I didn’t do anything – or at least much – about it when it happened.
We stayed together because: (a) When she graduated from college, she moved to be where I was. No job, no nothing, just a leap of faith. (b) When I got an offer I couldn’t refuse in Washington, and accepted it without even checking with her (to be fair, she didn’t expect anything different), she changed her graduate school plans to be no more than a couple of hours away from me. © We forgave each other our trespasses, some more serious than others. We figured out how to manage our radically different dispute-resolution styles. (d) Notwithstanding the differences in our personalities and tastes, we had a really deep compatibility, some of which was no doubt due to cultural/demographic similarities, and some of which was due to enormous mutual respect for one another. We each changed to fit the other, but not all at once or without any hitch. Each of us has done a lot to accommodate the other. (e) Neither of us felt a need to have sex with other people.
He was first my friend, then a guy I dated, then my steady … and I eventually realized I was in love with him. Good thing he realized he was in love with me, too. I was chatting with a young, newly married coworker today - she asked how we’ve made it work so long. I told her that we feel humor is important in our relationship. Oh, and it doesn’t help that I’m perfect (yeah, right …).