First Impressions

I met my husband because we share several mutual interests. For years, we drifted around the perifery of each others' lives without much impact, aware, but not really, of each other's existence. That all changed a couple of April's ago, when a series of improbable events brought us together in a way that we could not have predicted.

Like I said, I was minding my business, going to work at my big girl job in the big city, when one day I found this man at the center of my life. It was like a Mercury splashdown -- a manned space capsule descended, burning through the atmosphere, and parachuted to a spectacular landing behind the elaborately constructed walls around my heart.

Forget astronauts -- it was like a hurricane. I do not mean to make light of the circumstances of people who've lost everything to Katrina and Rita, but that's what happened the day he blew into my life. The landscape was rearranged -- altered -- in fundamental ways. Almost as if the life I'd constructed for myself never existed, except maybe as a hazy, far off dream.

And it was mutual. I wasn't the only one who was rearranging her schedule to fit in more time together. Nor the only one who dialed late at night, just to hear my lover's voice as I drifted off. Nor the only one who fretted about how to introduce this new person into a very tight circle of family and friends. As I look back at e-mails and journal entries from that time, I'm struck by how in tune we were from the beginning.

While it was as breathless as my previous encounter with "Love at First Sight," there was also something very grounded about those first months with my husband that was missing with that other man. I was calm -- eerily calm. And for the first time, I think I understood what all my coupled up friends had been telling me: when you meet the right man, everything makes sense. Even if it's nonsense. God, did I revel in falling in love.

Looking back, with all the benefit of hindsight, I can find a hundred or thousand or million things I'd do differently. But one thing I wouldn't (or rather, couldn't) change is the perfect sense of rightness between us. Even after I've peeled away all the lies and deceptions, I still find one fundamental truth: we are really good together.

Thus, my dilemma. How could anyone be THAT good an actor all the time? So I'm trying to find a balance between what I know to be true about us, and what I've learned about him that is inconsistent with all that. In the end, will I stay? At this point, it's hard to tell.

The Wife Who Knows