Anniversaries.

Tomorrow I will have married for 13 years.  Tomorrow also marks the 14 year anniversary of the day I met the man that I’ve been married to that long.

I always said I would never get married.  Growing up the child of a divorce wasn’t really the deciding factor in it.  I just couldn’t fathom the idea of living with someone and getting along with them for the rest of my life.  My  longest relationship before I met my husband was  only six months long.  Six months.  I got bored really easy.  I loved the chase of dating but once the whole boyfriend girlfriend thing happened I was like, NEXT!

Sounds horrible, but it was true.  I wanted to find “the one” and fall head over heels in love but I was a realist and if it hadn’t happened, it probably wasn’t going to.

I didn’t intend to meet a man and fall in love on that trip to Vegas in 1999.  My intention was to have a fun weekend of drinking and gambling with some new friends that I had never actually met and my mom in an exciting city I had never been to before.  And while all of that *did* happen, it was also the weekend I met the love of my life.

He was not physically what I would have said was my type.  He did have the long hair going for him, but he was not something I would have picked out in a line up of men I would say I would have been attracted to.  Having said that, neither was I for him.  But he made me laugh.  The connection was definitely helped out by a couple of his friends(our friends now) who both in turn planted a bug in each of our ears that the other might be attracted to us.

Our first kiss happened on the morning of the night we met.  We had been up all night gambling with those friends until they finally bid us goodbye so they could go to sleep and we were left alone.  He said he would like to walk me to my room and I let him.  Once we were there he asked me if I would like to kiss him.  Damn, no beating around the bush there!  I said that I didn’t know, did he want to kiss me?  He said yes and so we did.  It was a nice kiss.  I was staying in the hotel with my mom so I didn’t invite him in and that was how we left it.

The next day there was more gambling and drinking and kissing.  There were meals and things in between but I mostly remember the kissing.  We were both staying with people in our hotel rooms so it didn’t amount to anything other than making out in the hallway by the ice machine on my floor until a security guard asked if everything was okay.  “Why yes Sir, everything is perfect!”   In our gambling, we had earned enough to get a room of our own but Rob shut me down on that.  In the long run, I’m glad he did.  If we had slept together in Vegas I’m not sure things would have turned out the way that they did.  I might have just chalked it up to what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.  Who knows?

When I got back home to Maine there was an email waiting from Rob in my inbox.  It said: “I just got home and my dog kissed me.  You are a better kisser, but he has a longer tongue.”  How could you not fall in love with that??  😀

Over the next month we talked on the phone, emailed and chatted online nonstop.  In September, a month after meeting him, he cashed in his frequent flier miles and came out to Maine to visit me for an extended weekend.   When it was time for him to leave, I dropped him off at the airport and came home to where I was living with my mom.  I walked in the door and she said: “Well?”  I said: “I think I’m moving to Arizona.”  She nodded and said that she figured as much.

A month later in October I got laid off at my job at the bank.  When that happened, Rob extended the invitation to fly me out to live with him in Arizona.  It wasn’t a very hard decision for me to make.  I loved my mom and my friends, and had never lived anywhere other than Maine, but I had fallen hard and fast for this man like no other I had ever met and I knew I would be with him for the rest of my life.

A month later in November we took a Thanksgiving trip out to California for me to meet his family.  While he was giving me a tour of the school that he went to (Stevenson) he proposed to me.   We were in the chapel.  I was up on the part where the preacher stands looking at all the stained glass windows when the clock started chiming twelve noon.  I turned around and Rob was on one knee, ring extended.

So that was it.  From meeting to engagement in three months.  When you know, you know.  We were married in Las Vegas a year to the day that we met.

Tomorrow we will have known each other 14 years and been married for 13.  I can’t imagine anything else.