My heart's soulmate.

   I am thanking the lucky stars every day for my husband. As I look around us I realize how blessed we are to have found each other. I know more and more couples that didn't make it, single parents, bitter ex's, hurt lovers. These are people that made vows to each other to stick it out through better or worse, in good time and in bad, and eventually they gave up. Not to be selfish and use their unhappiness as a lessons for me to learn through, but I want to say thank you to all of them for making me realize that everyday with my husband is something to be cherished, everyday we are married is a day to be proud of.

   Daddy and I met over 14 years ago, at a night club. It was really a chanced meeting that turned out to be the best thing that happened to me. I was invited to come to my male friend's birthday at the club. At the time I was hoping that this friendship would turn out to be more. I brought my best friend and we decided that no matter what we would enjoy ourselves. As many times before, that male friend blew me off to go and meet other girls, so I decided to forget that I was there for his birthday, and do what my friends and I did best, dance on the dance floor the whole night. I loved dancing in those days, and I never went to night clubs to socialize or meet new people but only to get a chance to dance. I had couple of good girlfriends that liked to do the same thing. So that night we put all of our purses on the table next to the dance floor and we started dancing.

A month after we met

   After a while we wanted to sit down for a second and have a drink. We then noticed that there were three guys sitting at our table. All three of them were very polite and apologized for sitting at our table. So we asked them to dance with us. They were all very hesitant, but I remember grabbing one's hand and pulling him on the dance floor with me. You guessed right that he would eventually become my husband.

   We danced the rest of the night together and at the end of it his friend came up to me and said that I should ask him for his phone number because he was too shy to ask me. I wouldn't have done that. This sounded awfully like a line that guys feed naive girls. But luckily for our future I didn't have to ask for his number because he asked for mine.

   He called me the next day and we set up a date for Sunday at Red Robin's. To tell you the truth I didn't remember him much from that first night. So when Sunday came I was not quite sure about meeting with him again. I thought that he was too old, at  least  29 years old (I was 20 at the time) and I couldn't remember if he was even good looking. I decided not to go. We were supposed to meet at 7 pm and suddenly at 6:40 I decided that maybe I should meet up with him after all. What did I have to loose? I arrived about 10 minutes late and thankfully he was still there. (We talked about this day many months later and he said that he was about to leave).

   We spend that whole night talking. We discussed everything from our families to how many kids we wanted to have. We marveled at the fact that our birthdays were only a day apart (plus 4 years), and that we both had maternal grandfathers who passed away. We ordered some food and were so engrossed in conversation that we didn't even realize that Red Robins closed at 10. A lovely server came to us about 10 minutes after 10pm and informed us that the restaurant was now closed. He said that they will let us stay for 10 more minutes while they clean up, but then we have to leave. Yup, our very first date was so great that I couldn't believe that I lost track of time. I came home that night and announced to my sister that this was going to be the guy I was going to marry.

Our engagement cake

   I always felt so comfortable around Daddy. Even when we were just dating, I always felt like I have known him for ever. Our relationship was great for the most part, but I was battling many demons at the time. I grew up in a very dysfunctional family, where my parents eventually separated. My house growing up was filled with hatred and bitterness. Both my parents fought all the time and we as kids never experienced happily married parents. There was lots of abuse and infidelity in my parent's relationship and their fights would often end with month long silent treatment. Growing up I remember standing at the door to our apartment building and not wanting to go in for the fear of having to listen and witness more arguing and witnessing more abuse. All of this left scars on my self esteem. I was unable to believe that there were relationships that worked and I lived in constant fear that what happened to my parents' relationship would eventually happen to mine. Every time we would have the smallest of arguments I expected Daddy to leave me or hit me.

   But he was not that kind of a man. He was gentle and patient and constantly reminded me that he was not my father and that I was not my mother and that we didn't have the same kind of relationship as my parents. Over the years I came to trust him and I no longer believed that he would just walk away and leave me. He was calm and collected, whereas I was impulsive and explosive. He complemented me in a way I never experienced before.

Copyright - John Gordon

   So what is the secret to our relationship lasting for almost 15 years? My answer to that is communication! Even when things are uncomfortable to discuss, we still talk about them. We have build our relationship on honesty and being able to talk to the other person about anything. We have had many late night conversations about difficult topics, like finances, parenting, or dreams for the future. We are more than just married couple, we are best friends. But don't be fooled; our relationship is not strong because of luck but because of hard work. We constantly work on our relationship and try to iron out any "imperfections". I have learned form my parent's mistakes that arguing and silent treatments don't solve anything. We are, after all, two different people that often disagree about things, but as long as you disagree respectfully and you take the other's person point of view under consideration then there are no problems you can't resolve. Strong marriages don't just happen. Strong marriages are build by two people that work really hard on a relationship every day of their lives together. I am just happy that Daddy is the person that I get to do this hard, relationship work with.