Longer Together Than Apart

It occurred to me this week that if we were about to celebrate our 25th anniversary, and I met Josh when I was 25, and we dated for a while before getting married, that at some point in the past year or so, I moved over the boundary between being together with Josh longer than not being together with Josh.

There’s a line I love in One Day that goes:

“Finally, she loved someone and felt fairly confident that she was loved in return. If someone asked Emma, as they sometimes did at parties, how she and her husband had met, she told them: ‘We grew up together.” (p. 239)

It can, of course, be taken in two different ways. The casual meaning implies that they have known each other since childhood. They grew up in the same town or went to the same school.

But there is another meaning, the one that is clear to the book reader. They had to figure out this whole growing-up thing, and they figured it out together. They had ups and downs since college, highs and lows, wins and losses, and they put it all together into a whole truth: They both emotionally grew over the many years they were together. And they couldn’t have done it with this particular result without the other one.

That’s how I feel about Josh. We met each other when we were fairly young, just figuring things out in new adulthood. And we grew up together.

I feel so lucky that I got to step over that line and have him in my life longer than without. Here’s to making this new side, this with side, infinitely wide.