It was way back in our dating days.
We had gone out to dinner at an Italian restaurant and were seated at a rectangular table for two. We laughed as we sat down because the chairs were positioned at the short sides of the rectangle, with a whole lot of space in between us. Hellooooo, can you hear me way over there? It wasn’t a good position for any sort of conversation and even holding hands felt awkward because we were that far away.
One side of the table was against a wall and the other was close to another table, so there wasn’t room to simply move a chair to the side and be closer.
So, my still-boyfriend-not-yet-husband-or-even-fiance stood up and rotated the table, so we were each seated at one of the longer ends, and the shorter end was now the distance between us.
An older woman was walking by, escorted on her husband’s arm. She stopped and patted my shoulder and said “That’s how you know you have a keeper.”
We smiled at her and waited until she’d moved further on in the restaurant before we started laughing. Having more humor than romance, we questioned how she knew he’d been a keeper… as in a goalkeeper in soccer.
But the thing is- that laughter that day and throughout all the time we’d known each other, is how I knew I had a keeper.
Life definitely isn’t always easy, so neither is marriage. Two people having to work together, find compromises, and get through difficult times… add in three kids and all the normal stresses of everyday life, plus a few bigger throw-you-for-a-loop life events- and marriage can be really tough sometimes, so it helps to have someone who makes you laugh, whom you can laugh with.
I know I have a keeper. And he know’s I’m a keeper, too. Even if we might sometimes want to smother the other with a pillow, we’d never actually do it because we do love each other.
Which is how, despite some ups and downs, having many, many differences, we celebrated 14 years of marriage yesterday. Here’s to many, many more!
