How Did You Meet?

 

I planned to write about book banning this week, but I’ll put that off until my next newsletter, because something happened as I was preparing that message.

Last week, my husband and I celebrated the twenty-seventh anniversary of the day we met. We went out to dinner at Aventura Mall, and he took a funny picture of me with a giant monkey. I posted the photo on Facebook, and mentioned in passing that it was our anniversary. I didn’t put it out there to get accolades, just because it was a cute picture.

Of course, many friends, family members and casual acquaintances posted congratulations. We were surprised that a very close friend only “liked” the photo, and never sent us a message or a text celebrating the occasion.

When I asked her why she didn’t bother to type two words into the box, she said it was because it wasn’t a “real” anniversary. According to her, our real anniversary is the day we married, six years ago. She is an elderly woman in her early seventies, never married, and as far as we know has never had a significant romance, so her opinion is certainly colored by that.

I gently reminded her that was a heteronormative approach. The tradition for straight couples is to meet, date for a year or two, and then marry. So the actual date they met fades into unimportance. But for the first twenty years we were together, marriage wasn’t an option. We did file for a civil union at one point, so he could get onto my health insurance, but that date wasn’t that important to us.

I thought about my parents. My mother grew up in the right-hand side of a duplex in Trenton, New Jersey. The Crusades, a Syrian family, owned the left-hand half, and the Hershes, a Jewish family, lived in the detached house on the corner, to their right. When the Hershes moved out, my grandparents bought their house and moved in.

They kept their original duplex and rented out rooms there. When I heard my parents’ origin story, it was about my father’s friend Ed Kucharski, a fellow aeronautical engineer. They were looking for a room to share, and Ed went to my grandparents’ house. It was raining and he had his collar up and his hat down. My parents were glad my grandmother opened the door and let him in.

The story continues that my dad and Ed dropped my mother at the train station in Trenton each morning on their way to work. Fast forward a year or two (I have no idea how much time passed) and my parents were married, in my grandparents’ living room.

So the only anniversary they ever celebrated was March 21, 1953. Their wedding photo sat on our mantelpiece.

That made me wonder how other couples celebrate. The author Hank Philippi Ryan and her husband celebrate the day before they met—because one day can change anything. Some gay couples I know have multiple dates to celebrate—the day they met, the date of their civil union, then the day of their marriage.

My husband answered my online profile, and we emailed a few times before agreeing to meet. I spotted him on Lincoln Road on Miami Beach based on the description he sent me, and then joined him in line at a now-defunct coffee shop called Joffrey’s. We had dinner, walked, and talked, and I didn’t look at my watch until two AM.

That event is more meaningful to me than the day we drove to the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale and signed a few papers—though of course that’s an important date on our calendar.

How about you? What do you celebrate? Is there a “meet cute” in romance terms in your past? And, though I hesitate to ask, do you think that the day a couple first meets is as important as the date of a legal marriage?