The metaphor:
Tomorrow, my grandma is moving for the first time in 75 years. She’s leaving the house where she raised my dad and uncle for the retirement home where the rest of her bridge club lives.
Steve and I are part of the family crew helping her pack up this weekend, including yesterday, our 11th wedding anniversary. This is one of the many moments that moving back upstate let us be part of, which we’re so grateful for, even as we had no idea life would play out this way.
Back when we got married, this was all too far in the future to foresee.
The story:
One day and eleven years ago, when Steve was 26 and I was 28, we got married.
Though we’d been dating for seven years, we were on the early side of our friends getting married; we’d only been to a few weddings when we planned ours. By contrast, my dad’s parents got married two months after graduating college, and yet my grandma saw that as being on the late side because it was mid-July, while her friends were “June brides.”
Why seven years? Well, that’s the time it took for me to have three big revelations.
1) How I felt about him.
One of my closest college friends cornered me in late October of our senior year. We’d both been close with upperclassmen who had graduated, and we’d been relieved to make friends with some sophomore boys who lived in the next dorm room over.
Carrie pointed out that I’d been spending a lot of time with one in particular. “Why haven’t you told me that you like Steve?”
“I don’t like Steve!” I insisted, then heard myself continue, “I just want to be with him all the time!”
Turns out I’d been keeping that secret not just from her, but also from my own conscious mind. It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten news about my feelings from someone else, and it wouldn’t be the last.
We both laughed as, all at once, I realized how un-platonic I felt about the guy I’d been meeting up with daily at the dining hall and library, and playing online scrabble with when we were apart.In the couple of months I’d known Steve, he’d been so fun, kind, and steady. I didn’t know you could be all those things at once, that it could be so easy to be with someone.
Once I understood my feelings, it felt fraught for the first time. I knew immediately, overpoweringly, that I wanted to be dating him, but had no idea how to achieve that outcome without confessions I was afraid to make. I decided that instead of hanging out on campus, if we scheduled some activities together, they’d be dates – and if we did a bunch of them, we’d be dating, at least grammatically speaking.
I spent the next few weeks trying to get Steve out on dates, a campaign that seemed all the stranger as the semester moved into finals week. “Hey, I don’t think I have time to go ice skating, out to dinner, and to a museum on Friday, but thanks for asking,” he told me doubtfully.
Finally, I broke down and told him how I felt. I braced myself for all the ease to go out of our dynamic – and it didn’t. Not that night, when he told me he liked me, too, and not the next day, when I walked into his dorm room to find him surrounded by his friends. Instead of pulling away from me in front of them, like I feared he would, I’ll never forget his bright smile when he saw me, then beckoned me over to sit by him.
It only took a few more months for me to fall in love. I was at the college gym one February morning when it hit me, mid-early morning workout. I was on the elliptical, listening to 33 songs rotate on my iPod shuffle. Suddenly, I knew – and I had to tell him!
I leapt off the machine and ran across the snowy Connecticut campus. I punched his code into his door keypad and burst in, slowing just a little when I saw he was still in bed. He rolled over and opened his eyes, which I took as a green light. “I love you!” I announced, sweaty and irrepressible. “I couldn’t wait to say it!”
2) How I felt about other people.
In August ‘08, I moved into a DC rowhouse and back into friendship with Steve, who still had two years of college left.
I’d thought breaking up was the best way to avoid treating each other poorly, which I associated with long-distance dating, based on my brief high school experience with a summer camp boyfriend. My relationship with Steve had always been easy and kind, and I wanted it to stay that way.
Breaking up also seemed pragmatic: I didn’t believe there was just one person out there for each of us. We were young, and I thought we should be fully present where we were.
But I missed him hugely. We talked on the phone often and visited each other every few months. When he’d head to the northbound Megabus after a weekend in DC, I’d insist my roommates gather in the living room and talk about how great he was while I cried and ate sorbet for breakfast.
One of my roommates was also mourning a college relationship, and we’d commiserate by playing “The King of Wishful Thinking” from the Pretty Woman soundtrack. We’d dance around the hall between our bedrooms, singing ourselves a pep talk: “I’ll get over you, I know I will…”
By that spring ‘09, Steve had lined up an internship for that summer in DC, and I had realized there was something worse than not getting over each other: the possibility that one of us would. I’d done some dating and realized that I didn’t care if hypothetically, I could love other people. I wanted to be with Steve specifically. We got back together and stayed that way.
3) How I felt about the future.
When Steve graduated in spring 2010, he got an apartment just a couple blocks from mine. I’d had two jobs in two years; I was working on the advice to build up three months of savings, then pay down my student loan principle. Life felt hopeful but also precarious, each month a momentous portion of my adult life.
In spring 2011, I planned a romantic night at my apartment. I got a bottle of wine, he brought food to cook, and I planned to tell him I was serious about us. When the time came, I held his hand and told him that I loved him so much and wanted to be with him for the foreseeable future.
To me, this was the equivalent of Mufasa telling Simba that together, they ruled over everything the light touches. Every moment of time I could imagine, I wanted to spend with him.
“How long is the foreseeable future?” Steve asked gently.
My nonprofit job was grant-funded, I still had loans, and the Great Recession recovery was slow, but I’d finally finished my savings account goal. “Oh, it’s about three months long,” I admitted.
Kindly, but also beginning to laugh at me, he said, “So you’re telling me you want to keep dating…for the next three months?”
I was confused how this grand gesture had gone so awry. I wanted to be with him for all the time I had! Surely it was beside the point that I couldn’t foresee very far?
It hadn’t occurred to me that real commitment came from pledging the unforeseeable future, and it took another year before I was ready to do that. By fall 2012, Steve had become my partner: I wanted to face whatever lay ahead together.
That December, Steve both proposed to me and received the job offer that moved us to LA. We kicked off a two-year California period in August ‘13, got married in August ‘14, and moved from LA to Brooklyn in August ‘15.
Now, for the first time, we live somewhere we’d stay even if we lost our jobs – which of course, is still unforeseeable. Committing to a place as well as a person is a new kind of rooted feeling.
Of course, it’s nothing on my grandma’s 75 years in the same house. Tomorrow, she’ll go to sleep somewhere new. She’ll be surrounded by some familiar people and things, and far from others. How will it go? We’ll just have to wait and see.
The question: Every so often, I like to check how long into the future it feels like I can foresee. It’s rarely more than a year, and often less. How long is your foreseeable future right now?
Thanks for reading! If something resonates, please consider clicking the heart, replying with a public comment or private email, or forwarding to someone else.