when you know

Julianna’s parents knew they were going to be together two weeks after they met. Her mom was seventeen, her dad only slightly older. They know they are lucky.

Ted’s parents dated for six weeks, were engaged for six months, and have been married for more than thirty years.

Jules and I realized that virtually all our friends have still-married parents.

My own parents have the opposite of a love-at-first-sight story. They met at school when they were five; my mom says my dad didn’t invite her to his birthday party. They went to school together and had a lot of the same friends and ran into each other in the parking lot at Disney World when they were twelve. My dad went on FFA trips with my mom’s brothers; my mom dated all my dad’s friends.

When my dad asked my mom to marry him in the driveway of her parents’ house, no one inside cared because the United States had just beat the USSR at hockey. And they already knew what it had taken my mom and dad fifteen years to figure out.

~beatrix