What If You Just Don't Know It Yet?

I've lived in this story before.

I’ve written before that 2006 was the magic hour of my life, the most beautiful year I’ve ever known, the year I finally met my match.

We can match my marriage to the technology timeline: Online dating was a thing, but it was still kind of scandalous, and I had only tried it once, years before. The first time I tried it was a web site that I’m not sure still exists and whose name I can’t remember; it claimed to get over superficial impressions by letting people get to know each other organically before sharing pictures. Pictures were shared after four interactions, and the first several men I matched with blocked me as soon as they saw my picture.

This did not raise my confidence, but one guy bravely stayed the course, so even though my warning signs were blinking this guy is not for you, I agreed to a first date. He was searchable online, I could see the evidence that he had in fact sold his early tech company for a significant amount of money to Disney, which explained why he was now building a literal cabin in the woods, an hour outside of town.

He wanted me to come visit him in his cabin in the woods, and I am perfectly aware that this sounds like the start of an absurd horror movie, but as my friend Darrie can attest, it is absolutely the truth, because cell phones did exist in 2006, and I called her on the phone as I bumped through a gravel road in the wilderness.

“This is his name and this is his address,” I said to Darrie. I was not foolish enough to call Mom and tell her about this location, she would have been reasonably panic stricken. “In case he tries to kill me, ha ha.”

And for a little bit I worried he might. Fifteen minutes after I arrived at this cabin lit only by lanterns, my date invited me to try a sound bath sensory deprivation chamber he’d been building, and soon I found myself lying on a table in a dark room, alone, wearing headphones, while the guy closed the door behind him (DID THAT THING JUST LOCK?), saying that he would finish up preparing our dinner in the kitchen, I should relax, he would be back soon. I remember lying on the table and looking at the open window and thinking maybe I should just climb out, but he lived in the woods, and I didn’t know if I could find my car, and he could catch me anyway, if he wanted to, if I made a run for it.

(Note to everyone reading this: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, YOURS OR ANYONE ELSE’S. I am well aware that in a different genre, this could have been how my story ends.)

In the end, he turned out to just be eccentric, and I hope he found his eccentric match. But it did scare me off online dating for the next several years, lest I end up ONCE AGAIN ON A TABLE IN A DARK ROOM IN THE WOODS.

To top it all off, I don’t know if you remember, but back in those days, the big media story was the insight — backed by science!!! — that as a woman at the age of 38, I was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married. Literally, the odds were that the next guy who wanted to date me likely WOULD want to kill me, rather than marry me. I’m not kidding. This was the literal headline in the newsmagazines, back in 2006. Single Woman Likely To Get Killed By Terrorist.

The experts were telling me every day that I had no chance of having my dreams come true, and the real world was doing its best to back them up. Maybe the next time I found myself on a table in the woods, it wouldn’t turn out in my favor.

It was GRIM out there, people, and time was running out.

Meanwhile, In North Carolina

Online dating in 2006 was not a common thing among people past their 20s, and Steve had his profile private, so congregants wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon him. After years toiling online, he had already met “both the Presbyterians” in the Western North Carolina dating pool, and he was also starting to lose faith.

He had planned a trip to Atlanta the next month for the Festival of Homiletics, aka ComiCon for ministers, and thought perhaps there would be a wandering Presbyterian in town for the gathering, so he did the one and only search he would ever do outside of Asheville, and he specified women around his age, college educated, and at least open to the possibility there might be a God.

The very first profile that popped up was mine, written just one day earlier. Granted, there was no picture (I wasn’t going to make that mistake again), but the letter was funny and sharp, and as he said to a friend of ours recently, “I’d gotten to the point where I was desperate just for someone who could offer subject-verb agreement. Now this woman is talking about the axis of evil and she also wants to go paddling? Is this even possible?!”

So he wrote me back, the first lines of the first letter he ever wrote to me, “The Chattoga? Really?”

I read that sentence on a Saturday morning, and as I’ve said before, reading the email that followed gave me a shivery feeling, like I had gotten a letter from my best friend. I sat at my desk in my little house, and thought, how can this be real?

What Is Happening In Here?

After I read Steve’s first email, on a Saturday morning, an email that made me laugh and think of a million stories I wanted to tell, I immediately wrote back. But here’s the thing: I wasn’t trying to impress a new guy, I wasn’t trying to flirt, thank goodness, that has never worked out well for me. All I was trying to do was write a letter back to my best friend, which I did. It was easy to do, all the material was right there.

He introduced himself by noting that he was a Presbyterian minister, “which I understand might be kind of weird.” I wrote to him that I was raised in a Presbyterian church, and my mom was a Presbyterian minister.

“Also my dad’s a judge, and my brother’s a psychologist,” I wrote. “Apparently the universe thinks I need very close supervision.”

I could even assure him that dating ministers had no way to scare me anymore: “My high school boyfriend was the minister’s son,” I wrote, and I told him a story: once Ben and I snuck into the church kitchen to make out during Sunday services, but our brothers tattled on our whereabouts, and we lost track of time.

So I have this extremely vivid memory of standing with my back pressed up against the oven burners, in a dark kitchen, my fingers clutching the edge Ben’s shoulders and my eyes peering past his ear, with my blue Oxford shirt at least partially unbuttoned, and the kitchen door swings open, and there stands his father, my pastor, wearing a robe and carrying a Bible, framed in the bright light, thundering, “What is happening in here!”

So right up front, Steve knew that not only was I unlikely to hold it against him for being a Presbyterian minister, I also could endure significant religious trauma and laugh about it years later.

And right up front, I stopped trying to impress a guy I had never even met, and was just trading stories with my best friend.

Did THAT Really Just Happen?

I called Mom as soon as I hit send on that first letter. I couldn’t believe that this might be happening. A guy who could make me laugh out loud, a whitewater paddler, and a TarHeels fan? A man who looked at my list of three favorite books and said he absolutely agreed with me on Lonesome Dove, but when it came to Barbara Kingsolver he preferred Prodigal Summer to Poisonwood Bible? This was a fight I could imagine having for the rest of my life!

When I told her he was a Presbyterian minister, Mom went immediately to the presbytery registry, and looked him up.

“Robyn,” she whispered, as if she could hide her excitement, “He’s a Rhodes Scholar.” So the first thing Steve ever did to Mom was delight her, and I love that.

I hung up the phone on that Saturday morning, after I sent my response, and I went out for the day. My office was having a picnic, and I took Boo, my poodle, out to the park. We laughed with my friends, and played with my dog, and ate hot dogs, and all day long, I had a secret. All day long, there was a little buzzing in the pit of my stomach, not a certainty, but a question.

Is it possible, I thought to myself, all day long, in the bright yellow sunshine and the echoing neighborhood park, is it possible that my whole life just changed and I don’t even know it yet?

Somewhere out there, a Presbyterian minister was reading a letter from me. Sometime today, this guy was going to read my response, and either he’d feel the same way as me, or he wouldn’t. He might not. But maybe….

Is It Happening Again?

The feeling came again, when I was at the movies with Mom and Darrie that night, and my Blackberry buzzed (2006!), and it was five pages back from him, and just like that, we were off and running.

Steve admitted that he had not read the third book on my list, Pride and Prejudice, “because I’m a guy,” but it didn’t matter, because from the beginning our relationship was conducted like a Jane Austen novel, with the romantic leads writing each other letters back and forth.

We took immense pleasure in seeing who could write the most delightful emails to the other. It was competitive entertainment, from the very beginning. I’d read a letter from him, bust out laughing, and then sit down and try to one-up him, as best I could. It set up a dynamic for our relationship that exists to this very day, where we try to delight the other with our wit and insight, and we’re always both trying to win.

So. The world is terrible right now. The experts are once again telling us that we are likely to be killed by a terrorist rather than get a happy ending; and the crazy technology guy in the woods is trying to lock the door behind us.

All that is true. But I have a feeling I haven’t had inside of me since 2006, when I read that first letter from Steve. I have that same buzzy feeling I had in the park that day.

When I met Steve, it signaled the end of one act of my life, and the start of another. I can’t predict the future, of course. The current catalyst isn’t as clear cut as a letter from Steve, but my body recognizes the feeling. But I’ve been working with this idea for some months now, and something inside me is buzzing, against all reason, with the same question I had in the park, that Saturday, almost twenty years ago.

Did your whole life change and you don’t even know it yet?

Granted, it’s just a feeling. But God, does it feel good.

And for the first time in a while, I legitimately can’t wait to see what happens next.