I am not one of those women who are going to tell you that five years ago today, I married my best friend.  Because, well, not to state the obvious, but I don’t sleep with my best friends.  Not as a rule anyway.

But, I will choose another cliche.  Five years ago today, I married my soulmate.  When I was thirteen, a psychic told my mother (because my mother believes in such things), that I would marry twice, and that my second marriage would be the love of my life.  It was a prediction that always frightened me, because having lived as the child of parents who divorced when I was too young to remember, I always dreamed of being the kind of person that beat the odds, the kind of person who would give her children a happy family with a mommy and a daddy that lived in one place and loved each other madly.  In retrospect, I needn’t have put myself through so much angst. 

I met my husband shortly after the demise of my first marriage.  So shortly, in fact, that accusations abounded as to his role in my divorce (which was, incidentally, none).  After our first short fling, I warned him “Don’t take this seriously.  This is not about love.  This is about lust.”  On our second date he told me he was going to marry me.  I laughed.  He laughed last, and best, three years later, when we were married in the setting sun under a floral bower of twinkling lights, wearing hawaiian prints and giggling madly.

I think one of the highest compliments that can be paid to a member of the male gender is to be what people describe simply as a “Good Man”.  My husband is everything that term means, with all its deepest nuances.  He loves his wife.  He cherishes his child.  He honors his commitments.  He is steadfast in friendship. He is true to his God.  While I tease him of having the biggest ego on the planet, in truth I have never seen a man more honest in humility, or more decently humane.   He simply is what he is.

In eight blindingly short years together, we have endured close family death and illness, a heartrending journey through infertility, the loss of our home and two beloved pets, displacement, and life under the lens of three reigns of scrutiny in the SCA.  Some days it seems we have lived lifetimes in the blink of an eye.  And through it all, we not only emerged intact, but blessed.  We have endured and we have conquered.

It is said that marriage changes people.  Some feel loss in the capitulation to “coupledom”, and struggle to maintain their individuality.  I think the greatest joy of my marriage, the thing that makes every morning easier to rise to, every evening more peaceful, is that, after eight years, I am more “myself” than I ever was alone.  The participation in our joint life has made each part greater than the whole.  I am not “Mrs. Kris”.  He is not “Mr. Robbin”.  We are just “us”, a project of equal roles, roles that have blended so perfectly with our identities that they have simply become what we are.

Us.

Through the strength we have in each other, we have been able to give our son a love so profound that we could fold around him like a blanket when the everything around him was in upheaval and change.    His world, secure between us, went on with the rising and falling of the day in blissful innocence.  We are all together, and that is all that matters.

I cannot build in fantasy a more loving partner, a more perfect helpmate, a father more generous with his affection.  My prayers, my hopes, are for “more”, not “better”.  In my dreams, we still hold hands before our grandchildren, we still squabble over packing the car, we still stand side by side in the kitchen with the riches of domesticity spread before us on our table.  He is more beautiful to me with every passing day, and every day I try to live up to the gifts I have been given in abundance. 

I will never find the words to thank him for what he has given me, the meaning of our life together, the depth of my affection. All I will say, is MTAMTE, my love.  Every single day.