My husband and I celebrated our anniversary yesterday, as we do every year.  This is not the usual wedding anniversary, but a celebration of the day we met – February 12, 1993.

It has been 26 years since we met at a St. Valentine’s party at the clubhouse of the apartment complex where we both lived.  It was a wintry night.  I remembered vividly what I was wearing.  I loved my creamy white sweater that my sister gave me for my birthday a couple of months before – perfect for the cold February night.  I also wore a long golden chain necklace with an iridescent white oval pendant – also a gift from my sister to accompany my birthday sweater.

Saturday night arrived and I did not have anything else to do, so I went to the party.  I do not remember how much debate went on my mind before I decided to attend.  I would not consider myself the ‘social’ type, so I do not remember me going to many gatherings at the clubhouse.  Maybe this was the only one?  But it did not matter what happened before that night or how much thought went into my decision.  The truth is that destiny was taking hold of my life and serendipity was my guide.

There were a few dozen people at the party.  Some came and went quickly after going through the food line.  Others lingered.  I do not remember the crowd, but I will never forget the moment when my life changed forever.  I met my soul mate.

I remember sitting in the living room area of the clubhouse, with maybe three or four people around me.  We were introducing ourselves and suddenly I heard four words that raised my level of attention.

“I am from Idaho,” my (now) husband said.

And that was the start of our soul relationship.  Not many people know about Idaho, but I did.  I lived in Idaho a couple of years after graduating from graduate school.  I have just recently returned back to Michigan when we met.  In fact, I lived in the same town where my husband was from.  And it got even more astonishing as we continued to talk through the night.  Everyone else around us began to disappear as my senses focused on only one person in the room.

It was serendipity.  We do not have any doubts about that.  We were meant to meet at that particular time and place.  We learned that we worked at the same company and office building in Idaho for several months during the summer of 1992, when my husband was doing a summer internship.  He worked for a different department, but our sections were not that far apart in the building.  In fact, when he described one of the summer projects, I remembered seeing a display about it.  But we never met there.  It was not the right time.  Then we started exchanging names of friends and acquaintances from Idaho.  Later on I learned that my previous boss in Idaho knew my father-in-law relatively well.  One more thing.  I found out that my father-in-law also worked for the same company.

After the wondrous evening, we began to realize that we have shared personal connections that were hard to believe or understand, if not for their magical meaning.  We never met in Idaho because it would not have worked then.  Many of my friends and family questioned why I took the job in Idaho.  Now I know, and they know, why.  I needed to be in Idaho so I can experience my husband’s hometown in preparation for our fateful meeting on February 12, 1993.  I liked my job in Idaho very much.  I learned a lot and I was able to use my expertise in a meaningful way.  But after a couple of years, I felt that I needed to come back to Michigan.  Something was pulling me back.  Destiny was waiting for the right moment to spell its magic.  And it happened on that evening where two soul mates met.

Beyond the circumstances surrounding the Idaho connection, we also realized that there was a very small window of opportunity for our souls to bond.  My husband closed on the house that we live in a week after we met.  He had already decided to move on from the apartment and had put an offer on a house.  I did not exist in his life when he bought the house.  He was prepared to take the big step of home ownership as a single man.  If it was not for the stars aligning on February 12, we probably would not have met.  It was meant to be on that day.  I popped up in my husband’s life just in time, and the rest is history.

We started dating immediately.  He asked me to a hockey game – my first hockey game ever!  He brought me a hockey sweatshirt for me to wear to the game.  I still have the sweatshirt!  We went to movies, dinners, antique shows, car shows, jazz concerts, and many other events.  He got me involved in car racing, although I already had a soft spot for cars because of my dad.  The love of cars was yet one other thing we had in common.  We became, and still are, inseparable.  We enjoyed each other’s company during our dating years – and still do today.  There are many things that I would like to write about our love relationship.  I will get into more details later.  For now, I wanted to focus on how we met.

I have always believed in magic.  I believe that the unbelievable is possible.  I believe in the impossible.  I believe that there is a force in the universe that sometimes gives a nudge to make things happen just right.  We were blessed by that magic.

My husband and I are soul mates.  We were meant to be together.  We believe that our love is special and forever.  After 26 years together, we still hold hands, we kiss in public, we embrace each other, we hug, and we express our love in as many ways as we can.  Our eyes are always gazing at each other as they did the first time when we met.  “I love you” are the most frequently words that we tell each other every day, always with a kiss, at the beginning and end of each day.  With those words, we pay tribute and gratitude to the single point in time where our souls met and our lives became one.

And that is why we celebrate the day we met.  Nothing else would have been possible if not for that blissful day in our love history.

Thank you Universe!  Cheers to Serendipity!