Love at First Sight - It Does Exist!

My family has this weird way of doing everything in the years divisible by five. There are several members who celebrate milestone birthdays on the 5's (we call them "the fivers"); the trend started in 1915 with my maternal grandmother and lasted until 1995. (I had really hoped to have a fiver, but my son was born in early 2006. As far as I know, no one is due to have a baby this year either, so it looks like the trend has officially ended.) My sister is a fiver, having just celebrated her 50th birthday, and I am as well. (Stay tuned for posts about turning forty. I'm actually pretty excited about it.)

But it doesn't end there. All of us siblings got married in a year divisible by five. My sister in 1990, my brother in 1995, and me in 2000. We told our mother it was so that she could easily remember how many years we'd each been married, but I'm pretty sure it was just coincidence. Although it does come in handy when I'm trying to remember how many years I've been married.

FIFTEEN. Fifteen years. It still blows my mind that someone agreed to spend the rest of their life with me, and that the someone was my first love. Now before you start gagging, it's a really sweet story. See hubs and I met way back in high school at a drama club meeting. He was a sophomore, and I was a senior. Someone introduced us, and his first words to me were, "Those are some funky eyebrows." I thought he was making fun of me. Who wouldn't? My eyebrows were funky. And by funky I mean unnaturally thick. Frida Kahlo thick.

See?

But he was actually admiring them. I shrugged it off, but I couldn't get him out of my head. Later in the meeting our friend Jen was singing "Age of Aquarius" and I distinctly remember getting this feeling that I had just met my soul mate. That this underclassman, this eyebrow critic, was going to be my husband some day.

He would be. Eventually. But first I had to find out who he was, where he lived, and did he actually like me? Later in the week I was coming home from a blind date that had gone quite poorly, and when I pulled into my driveway, there was my destiny. Heading to Mighty with his friends. I invited him to take a walk with me to the playground across the street, where we got to know each other and would have kissed if it weren't for my mother's headlights beckoning me to "GET. HOME. NOW." (They had slightly panicked when they saw my car but not me.)

We dated for a while in high school, but as high school romances go it wasn't all that wonderful. Too many feelings, not enough feelings, feelings for other people, foolish mistakes - all the good stuff of YA romance. We had a love/hate relationship after that until the day he broke my heart. The day he told me he was planning to marry this other girl and I felt an ache in my chest like nothing I had ever felt before.

Now I know I have a flair for the dramatic, but my chest truly hurt that day. Nevertheless, I accepted my fate and accepted the girl, and made a plan to stay single forever in my house full of cats. Because truthfully? No one ever compared to him.

That's us in the Netherlands. So young!

Fast forward a year or two. He made plans to come in from college and visit his girlfriend, and they were going to road trip out to see me for a day. Only the moment he got off the bus, she dumped him. Now I'm not going to say that he immediately came running into my arms and I welcomed him in a warm embrace. This is reality, not a romance novel. It took some time. But within a few weeks he invited me to come with him to visit family in the Netherlands, and the night before we left we officially declared ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend. A year later we were engaged.

Our marriage has survived several deployments (one that lasted nearly nine months), infertility, the crazy invasive process that is an adoption home study, and all the little ups and downs that come with being a couple. Hubs asked me last night if I thought we'd make it to fifteen years. Of course I did. The universe went through all that trouble to bring us together, there's no way I'd do anything to screw that up. Also? I'm not the easiest person to live with, but for some reason he gets up every day, smiles at me, gives me a kiss, and makes me feel like I can conquer anything.

Even if he no longer likes my eyebrows.