If you’d asked my 20-year-old self, she would have told you that happy marriages didn’t really exist, or at the very least, were quite rare. Most of the marriages I had seen were two people eroded by compromise over many years, each person being less than who they were when they started. Watching my mom in a relationship with my challenging father, marriage seemed incredibly confining. I didn’t want to be confined. I assumed that marriage required fitting myself into a narrow little box of someone else’s making. Nope, not for me.
But then, in my mid-twenties, two of my dearest friends each got engaged. Their relationships were mutual, vital, and creative. They weren’t eroding; they were supportive. They weren’t confining; they seemed, at least from the outside, open to expansion and growth. They were fun and playful. They broke a mold of what I had understood marriage to be. Suddenly, I saw a little narrow path where marriage might be possible.
Yet still, partly because of the intensity of my commitment to my spiritual journey, I found it wholly unlikely that I would ever find a partner who would fit me. A friend of mine tells the story of riding in the car with me through the green hills of Hwy 280 up through the San Francisco Peninsula, and I was telling her that I might never find a partner. In that moment, I couldn’t fathom finding someone who could be my life partner. With a kind of sad acceptance, I told her I had to be ok with that.
But that didn’t mean I was at peace with being alone. I was in inner conflict: part of me wanted a relationship, part of me thought I would never have a long-term one, and part of me pushed it all away as impossible.
One morning, around the age of 29, I let it all go. I had recently broken up with my girlfriend, and I was lying in bed on a Sunday morning when it struck me with stunning clarity that I was ok being alone. I didn’t want to be married, I didn’t not want to be married. The point was, I was ok. I was ok no matter what, and I felt really at peace with whatever happened next, including being alone.
Looking back, I think that realization was a necessary realization to prepare me for what was to happen next.
I met the love of my life.
Well, actually, he was in the next room. He was one of six roommates in a big house in Mountain View, CA. So maybe it’s more true to say that I eventually recognized the love of my life. He had been right in front of me.
We were just friends… at least to start. Maybe that’s a great way to start.
We were the oldest people in the house at that time, and we would sit and have coffee and have deeper conversations on Friday mornings about spirituality, Taoism, life, etc. Connecting was easy, comfortable, and interesting.
I didn’t consider dating him; he was my roommate, and as Michael likes to say, you don’t poop where you eat.
But one day, I decided to move to Los Angeles with a friend. That’s a whole other story, but I’ll cut to the end: Our departure date was set, and I had rented out my room and quit my job. Three days before I was supposed to depart, I felt a crisis within me. I wasn’t sure I was supposed to leave. I called my mom, and I remember her telling me, “Sonya, I think you need to stay. You aren’t done with Michael yet.” She would later tell me that she had had a dream of my husband 15 years earlier, and when she met Michael, she recognized him as the man from her dream.
That afternoon, my friends and I went to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding. There are moments in that movie that are straight out of my childhood. So when the main character kissed the man who would become her husband, my mind replaced her with me and the man with Michael. I literally slapped my palms on my forehead in the theater. “Oh crap! I have a crush on Michael!” I realized I had to deal with it.
So, summoning my courage, I went home and knocked on the door to his room. I told him I wasn’t leaving after all; I had decided to stay. And I had to tell him something that I was afraid would compromise our friendship.
“I have feelings for you that are more than just a friend.”
His response: “Uh… Uh… Me too!”
He later told me he was in shock. Before I knocked on his door, he was berating himself with regret because he hadn’t told me how he felt, and he’d lost his opportunity because I was leaving.
Within a swirl of three days, I got a promotion at work, a new, beautiful place to live, and I bought a new car. Mike went to visit his parents for a few days, but he was back in time to help me move out. Once I had moved out, we had our first kiss in the kitchen.
Two weeks after we started dating, I accidentally called him my husband. I apologized profusely, and he just smiled and said, “I don’t mind at all.” His proposal to me a few months later was simple. We were standing in line at a restaurant, and he turned to me and said, “So, should we make it official?” It was obvious. And we both knew. There was only one answer. “Of course.”
I have since tried to explain this feeling to friends and clients who are single and looking for a partner. Being with Michael was so different than dating anyone else. Yeah, we “checked all the boxes” of things that mattered to us in a relationship, like shared desire for growth, the shared interest in spirituality, our shared love of martial arts, our ability to laugh and play together, and similar values about finances and family. I tell my clients to make sure that the most important pillars of their values match their partner’s pillars before they get married, and Mike’s and my pillars were certainly a match.
Ultimately, what made this relationship different from all the others was something much deeper and intangible. It was as if we both dropped deeper into our hearts and bodies; the word commitment is a funny one in this case because it didn’t require a mental commitment. The commitment happened deep in our hearts, souls, and bodies. It was for our minds to recognize that the commitment had already happened. We came home to each other; we are home to each other. Does this mean we’re perfect? Oh, heck no. But we are committed to growing through our imperfections together. Could I teach a class on how to architect all this? Nope. It’s a bit of a mystery to me. One that Michael and I are grateful for every day.
