Love, Tableside

Somedays, you wake up and realize that you’re precisely where you need to be and who you need to be with. It’s not a sudden onset of clarity, mind you, but the ever-whelming flood of experience, time, and understanding that comes from spending waking and sleeping moments with the one who somehow rounds out your edges. Perhaps in the haze of the dawning sun drifting through your window, you realize that all the paths worn out for searching were to lead you to this person, this exact point in your stories where the individual threads could be woven into something much more substantial.

Emma is the summation of years of searching, of paths worn smooth for the journeys that happened on them. Left to fate or God, I’m sure the result would be no different. I am with who I’m meant to be with.

We all have histories and relationships that have been formative in our understanding of ourselves. We have missed opportunities that we feel would have changed our course of history. We have long-lost loves that suddenly appear in our lives for a season, refining our belief in the “what ifs” and the heady possibilities of fantasy. We have beautiful souls and broken hearts and alternatively play both the potter and the broken sherd.

We idealise finding our other halves until we get so worn out by all the attempts at reconciling their wholes to ours that we understand that…it’s never been about being half and finding another. Emma and I understood, early on, that it was one whole added to another; we gave all, not some, to the relationship, and together, we’re better for it.

Relationships are messy things. They’re fraught with histories and mistakes. They come with baggage and pasts that can be both frightening and bemusing. They provide table-side conversations and pillow-talk, the stories of what brought us here, and the reminders of our triggers that drove us away from the others. It’s terrifying to be vulnerable in these moments because you get to see all of the other person and they see all of you.

We forged our relationship over Marco Polo, FaceTime, and daily communication. We realised that one of our most significant obligations to each other was to talk through everything, not just some things. As much as it hurt or was scary to deal with having to come clean with our fuckups and failures, we knew that whatever festered in the dark would inevitably come to light, and better to deal with it now than later. We spent the time on knowing each other first and foremost before trying to make it anything more.

Almost four years after that moment of our first meeting, we’re married, settled into our cross-Atlantic adventures, three sovereign nations representing our story (America, Canada, and Ireland), and a lot of frequent flyer miles. We’ve spent our resources on the things that have mattered to our foundation and those that haven’t. However, we’ve recognized that all our work on laying the foundations of communication, honesty, and connection has led to us enjoying the ridiculous edges of life with no thought of embarrassment or shame. We’re burping, farting, laughing messes of humanity and dear souls? If that’s not telling who we are deep down in our core, then I don’t know what else to say.

So, on this Valentine’s Day, this manufactured holiday of contrivance and extravagance, remind yourself of the road that got you to where you are today, the person you’ve become, and the people who have added their threads to your story. Valentine’s Day isn’t about couples and the existence of steamy romance between two persons; it’s a recognition that the love between people is there as a unifying strand, a cord comprised of the histories, personalities, and moments that have made us who we are today. Rest in the knowledge that you are loved above all else, regardless of the paths you’ve trod.

In all things and at all times, I love my other whole, my fellow traveler, my Emma.

May it ever be so.