How We Met

Intriguing how people meet
their life partners and choose
to marry. Luck and chance are
sometimes involved. Or fate?

Some choose to marry high school
sweethearts. Not in the cards for me.
I was in graduate school and teaching
at a university where my husband was

also a grad student. We had seen one
another from afar, mainly at soccer
matches. Then socially at a party where
many students were. We struck up a

conversation and had numerous ones
over the ten years of our courtship.
Graduate school and research
are sometimes long and involved.

Ours became a long-distance relationship
when my husband moved to a different
state to pursue grad work. I continued
my grad work. We managed many

trips and flights back and forth over
the years. Then his job after finishing
brought him to Upstate New York. We
continued our conversations. We married

in Virginia. Fate and choices intertwined
to weave our lives together. From our
vantage point, the views were spectacular.
Now older and wiser, we were more patient.

Being in the right place at the right time
worked for us. We shared similar values and
a faith. Time teaches us perspective. We
have had joys, sorrows, mistakes and magical

moments. The events of our lives shaped
us into who we are today. Neither of us
resembles our twenty-something selves,
but we have shaped each other’s values,

attitudes and tastes. Had we not met in
that place and time in grad school, our lives
certainly would have been different. Our
most important influence has been family.

Family stories are told of how people met.
My own parents met when both of them
were students in Boston. Had they not
attended the dance, they might never

have met even though both were from
towns in Massachusetts just a few miles
apart. Our habits and happiness have
a continuous kind of enchanting poetry.