This old house is falling down around my ears
I’m drowning in a river of my tears
When all my will is gone you hold me sway
I need you at the dimming of the day
You pulled me like the moon
Pulls on the tide
You know just where I keep my better side

– Alison Krauss, Dimming of the Day

I met my husband when I was 22 and he was 28, and we were both in university.  I think, like the Savage Garden song says, that I knew I loved him before I met him.  I still remember watching him walk across the coffee shop towards me on our first date and thinking that this was the guy I was going to marry.  I sat and listened to his soft voice, almost a half-whisper, and wanted to listen to it forever.  The next night, when he ran his fingers through my hair and said he wanted to watch it go grey, I knew he felt the same way.  We were married 21 months later, at the same church my parents got married at in July of 1974.  I chose a dress with chiffon sleeves and a five foot train, anxious that I not look like a child skipping down the aisle towards my older groom.

My husband is an immensely quiet man, an intellectual and an academic.  He is, by nature, very solitary, and tends towards shyness.  He is also the epitome of patience.  You would think, given my starkly different temperament, that we would be a poor match, but that has not been the case.  We balance each other out, bring each other towards the middle.  I have drawn him out, and he is more talkative and social than he used to be.  He has settled me, soothed me, saved me from myself more times than I count.

He is alternately amused, baffled and colossally irritated by his mercurial wife, stormy as I am, temperamental and naturally given to extremes.  But he goes with it, somehow, putting  up with flying plates and high moods and flowing tears.  We laugh at lot, tease each other with inside jokes, and share an enduring and tremendous respect for each other.  We are good to each other, in big ways and small, truly and always invested in each other’s happiness and well-being.  By the end of the day, we are ready to be together once again.

He has  always had a sort of tunnel vision, an instinct for what is real and the best of me, and what is the crazy, flailing, rest of me.  He knows who I am.  He knows that I remain staunchly committed to our marriage, to our family, to our life together.  And he absolutely knows how much I love him.  I’m not sure that I believe in soul mates, but I do believe in people being meant to be together, and meant to be we are.

It hasn’t always been easy, and it hasn’t always been fun, but it has always been right.  He is the bridge over all of my troubled waters, every day, in every way.  He is the grace, as Snow Patrol says, that reminds me to find my own.  And he is only person on the planet that I would want to share this next chapter of my life with, where mental health and new possibilities abound.

All my love and gratitude, always.  Thank you for loving me.