Data point

While B and I have only (only!) been married for six and a half years, last Friday our relationship reached the age of majority and can now vote and go out for a drink, at least in Ireland. Yes, it's 18 years since that fateful night in The Yellow House pub in Rathfarnham, County Dublin when I first thought, "He's quite tall", and he thought, "She's a girl", or whatever his rationale was for introducing me to the lyrics of Monty Python's Philosophers Song, which I found hilarious, as is only natural when you've never heard it before and you're 19 and you've had a couple of drinks. (I was a good audience.) I turned out to be a little wrong about his height: he was sitting down and is long of torso, not so much of leg; but heck, he was right, and here we still are.

It's not been 18 unbroken years, mind you; just when we were in the same geographical location, which wasn't as often as you might think, with a period of trans-Atlantic LDR before I finally managed to move to the USA. When we got engaged and had to go and talk to a priest about the pre-Cana course, I told the good Father that we'd been "on-again, off-again, you know." He fixed me with a stern eye and said, "I hope there won't be any more of that now." "Of course not," I replied, shocked that he thought I might not be taking this seriously.

We don't celebrate this particular anniversary with any more than a kiss these days, since it falls only a week after B's birthday, and we have a wedding anniversary in July that we use instead; but I didn't want the occassion to go totally unremarked. I'm not at all surprised to find that I've known him almost half my life, but I am somewhat amazed that I went almost 20 years without him.