The best thing in my life

The best thing in my life isn't exactly a thing.  He's a person.  In fact, he's my husband.

My husband and I have been together for 11 years and married (as of this coming Sunday...you know, Halloween?) for 8.  I love him more today than I did when we first got married - and I loved my husband a lot even then.  We've been through hell together and come out burned, battered, and broken.  But we're still together, which is something that I thought wouldn't be the case.

I met my husband when the two of us were attending Job Corps in WA.  He was in Culinary Arts and I was in Clerical.  To be perfectly honest, I thought he was an asshole when we first met.  He was condescending and more than a bit full of himself.  He was also 18 and I was 22.  He was too young for me, or so I thought.

I didn't want anything to do with him so I avoided him if possible.  I played D&D and he was there.  But Job Corps was a large enough group of people that I was able to avoid him for the most part.  Then he got put in charge of the Orientation end banquet.  He was in and out of my Orientation class, getting our allergies/preferences/etc.  He was actually really nice.  I found myself beginning to soften towards him.

One of the guys in my Orientation class tried to get me to agree to go out and I shot him down on the morning of the banquet.  When we got to the banquet, everything was awesome.  My husband and his friends served everyone cheerfully, and cracked jokes to make us smile.

I'm a rather anti-social person when it comes to face to face interactions.  I'm a lot better now, but eleven years ago I was still very much against being part of a crowd.  So my friend Rachel and I waited for everyone else to file out after the banquet.  The culinary students were all in there, cleaning up and making jokes.  Then me...the most anti-social person there...I walked up to my husband (who I really didn't like, remember) and gave him a hug.  We were both kind of shocked.  I mumbled some kind of thanks and scampered out after Rachel.

The banquet ended right around the beginning of the regular lunch hour, so we had a lot of time to kill.  Rachel wandered off to do something while I took a walk around the grounds.  When I came back around, I saw him standing in the gazebo smoking with the rest of the culinary students.  I walked up and gave him another hug, thanking him again.  We chatted for a minute, and then he asked me if I was seeing someone.  I was depressingly single at the time, and had been even before I went to Job Corps.  So I told him no.  Then he asked me if I'd like to go out some time.  I said, "Sure!"  I said it in such a bubbly, cheerful, high pitched voice that I cracked a few people up.  We agreed to meet after trade (the time you were in classes or doing the on the job style training we did) for dinner and to talk about our plans.

Eleven years later, I'm still with him.  We hit a rough patch where we broke up for about 4 months.  During that 4 months I finished figuring out my life and who I thought I wanted to be.  He did the same thing.  Then he came to Idaho to live with me in January of 2002.  If you've never ridden a bus through the mountains between Washington and Idaho in the middle of winter.....don't.  It's NOT an adventure I'd like to repeat again and he feels the same.  But he got here, we got things worked out, and we got married on October 31, 2002.

He is my love and my lover.  He is my other half, my cheerleader, and my best friend.  Without him I wouldn't be who I am today because he has helped shape me.  As I have helped shape him into the man he is.  And we continue to shape each other.  We are partners and companions for each other.  We are complete opposites, and a recent study shows that opposites don't really attract for stable relationships.  Well, we have our fights - all couples do - but we're a living contradiction to that study.  In our case, opposites really do attract and we love being so different from each other.  It makes for interesting days and fun conversations.