When you talk to your girlfriend or boyfriend and the past doesn’t matter as much as your future together, that’s how you know that he or she is the one.
Invariably, when people find out that I have been married to the same woman for 24 years, they will ask me, how did I know then that my wife was the one that I would be spending the rest of my life with; that she was the person I would grow old with? Because I don’t know the answer, I always give this retort, “I have no idea. You’ll have to ask my wife. It was all her. I had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
Although there is some kernel of truth in that answer, you don’t have to have an advanced degree in psycho-analytics to figure out that that’s a cop out. A cop out that only gets compounded by the fact that my wife is also my childhood sweetheart (we first met when I was 9 and she was 11, I have therefore been married longer than I have been single). Because of this, I have resolved to categorize this question into one of the great unsolved mysteries of life. The same in industrial strength to mysteries such as what happened before the big bang or why, when I am in a line, I always happen to be in the one that’s not moving.
That is, until today. Today, I stopped relegating my marriage longevity to the mystery bin because I have had my Eureka moment at last. Incidentally (or is it serendipity), today (Dec 29) is also our anniversary. Not our wedding anniversary, mind you, but the day when my wife became my girlfriend. That’s probably why I was able to finally figure it out. I was in a boyfriend, not a husband, frame of mind the whole day today.
“This problem,” Thomas Edison once said, “once solved, will be simple.” Truer words cannot possibly ring more true because the answer to this mystery is surprisingly simple and it is this:
When you talk to your girlf/boyfriend and the past doesn’t matter as much as your future together, that’s how you know that he/she is the one. Whatever his/her past, if you never want to dwell on it and the only thing you can envision is your life together in the future with 2.4 kids, a dog and a cat, car payments, a house mortgage, utility bills and school tuition fees, then you know that he/she is the one.
And when that future comes 25 years hence and you look at your wife while she is sleeping and you tell yourself that she looks more stunning now — gray hair, cucumbers on her eyes, green goo masking her face — than she did 25 years ago, that’s how you know that you’ve finally . . . arrived. Arrived at the future that you envisioned in the past. The one that told you then that she is and was and always will be . . . the one.
AndreassenGB Blog 