Dating and other bad habits.

I am always intrigued by the answers to the question, “how did you meet?”.  Maybe we don’t remember how or where we found the person, just that we did and it made sense, and here we are. Often it is through friends, or at work, or insert-obvious-meeting-place-here.  But then there are those with really great meeting stories–the kind worth telling again and again.

The woman I call my sister got married this weekend. First, I need to qualify that while we may walk alike and talk alike, much like Patti Duke we are not sisters at all. We aren’t even identical cousins. We’re just two writers who met via email while discussing a community event and we kind of, well, fell in love.

There I was, reading her emails, thinking how much I wanted to meet the person on the other end of this keyboard. She wrote like me, thought like me, had a twisted sense of humor like mine. And when we met it just made sense. People started asking if we were twins, or at the very least sisters, and eventually we just said yes. So, meeting my sister of another mister is, in fact, one of those very meeting stories I’d say was a little bit interesting.

But more interesting is how she met the guy she just married: She met him at her bachelorette party.

Yes, really. Many many moons ago, as a young pup, she married her high school sweetheart. It was her early twenties and she was either fresh out or very nearly finished with college. She was blonde then, and seemingly innocent looking, but still had a love for poodles and heavy metal. Her sorority sisters took her to a bar (probably covered in penis necklaces and sporting a “bride” tiara) and it was there, at that bar, that my sister first met her future husband.

But of course, before she could acknowledge him and allow him to be the love of her life she had to spend five years being married to some other dude first.  A nice dude by all accounts too, just not the bacon to her breakfast.

It would be years later, in the middle of her divorce and a soul-search, that some guy she didn’t really remember meeting in a bar would find her on the internet. She would fight it at first, just let it be what it was and argue that it wasn’t anything serious. He would live with her after a time, except she would never give him a key to the house and he wouldn’t pay any rent. She would vow to never remarry. And finally, she would allow the rest–as they say–to be history.  She would finally recognize that this was a love she could not ignore or deny any longer.

And it isn’t a fairy tale by any means. But it does give me a little hope that love actually is all around us.

She met her forever home at the bachelorette party for her first wedding.  She had no idea she’d ever be divorced, much less married twice. She had to make mistakes in order to understand what really fed her soul.