Love Is Patient
Sometimes it takes a while to find it
Question: How do two people ever find each other in a world of 8 billion people (give or take a million or so)?
Answer: All kinds of ways, and each one unique.
The journeys that my partner and I took to each other featured 122 combined years of joys and regrets, blessings and pain, delights and failures. By the time our paths crossed we had birthed six children and married off four of them, buried eight grandparents and two fathers-in-law, traveled much of the world, and divorced twice. We each brought a lot of history when we first met at the Stadium Pub almost two years ago, and those histories played a pivotal role in knitting our lives together.
Over the course of a first date that lasted nearly two hours but felt more like ten minutes, we learned that many of our life experiences didn’t just resonate with each other but echoed. We both moved — a lot — growing up. Our siblings and their families matter — a lot — to us. We both graduated from smaller liberal arts colleges. We devote a part of most days to physical activity, and we generally eat with an eye towards healthy nutrition. And neither of us like beer or fried foods, but we’ll accommodate others even if it means a first date at a bar that serves pretty much only beer and fried foods.
Our next dates — a Peruvian dinner, morning coffee followed by a long walk, an afternoon superhero movie and a shared wine flight — went largely the same way: so many points of connection. We found uncanny compatibility. Both generally optimistic and upbeat, we have enough scars to recognize that perfect is usually impossible and good is plenty. And while our children figure prominently in our lives, we agree that they need to choose their own paths and that we need devote our energies first to our own lives and ambitions and joys.
By the time we met, I had committed to a move to Montana. Knowing that the dating pool would be shallow there (after all, just over one million people live in the entire state, so it’s not teeming with single women in the 55–65 cohort), I planned to practice the whole dating thing in California to avoid rookie mistakes where I could least afford them. For her part, Kim understood what she wanted in a relationship, and, unsurprisingly to those who know her best, she set out with clear-eyed intention to find it. We each made our way to the dating app Bumble, which gave us our first glimpses and sealed our shared future.
Our journey together hasn’t been without challenges, but from the very start we both found deep contentment in our relationship, a kind partner who assumes good intent, someone who laughs easily and often, someone who listens attentively (most of the time anyway). Passion rises too; I’ll never tire of the vision of Kim dressing in the morning and undressing at night. We travel well together, whether we’re flying across the country or driving to the grocery store. We’ve developed a love that settles us in the best ways, that calms our fears, that sparks our delight with each thoughtful gesture to signal our commitments. Neither of us is a perfect person, but we both see our perfect partner in the other.
We can’t know the future, though we expect it will hold moments of incredible joy and devastating loss, celebrations of milestones for us and for all the people important to us, trips to destinations that fire our curiosity, explorations of ideas and values and priorities over a firepit and a shared glass of pinot noir. Mostly though, it will be a steady march of quiet mornings and errands; of feeding the dogs and ourselves; of gardening and watching shows together; of brushing teeth and showering; of sharing articles, memes, and reels lying next to each other in bed.
Perhaps not especially remarkable to 8 billion or so other people, but magical to two.
