There's Someone I'd Like You to Meet

It was nearly twenty years ago, but I remember countless, vivid moments from my first day of college. Furrowing my forehead ever-so-slightly during the drive to campus. Carrying my absurd amount of belongings into my dorm room (I'd shed half of them by the time I graduated). Dawdling in my goodbyes to my parents, while paradoxically hankering for independence.

Even though those moments swelled with every kind of emotion, they weren't surprising. Not at their core. It wasn't until the late afternoon, after the goodbyes were over and the families had left, that something shifted.

I looked across a circle of students, spotted a guy with the kindest eyes I'd ever seen, and thought, "I could marry him."

Let me back up! First of all, I hadn't gone to college with the expectation of meeting my future spouse. That wasn't part of the plan. If it happened anyway, as an extra perk? Sure, I wouldn't object. But it wasn't on my radar, and it certainly wasn't a driving force.

This guy, though. Tom. There was something so comfortable and welcoming about him. We were in the same pre-orientation group, and we were about to spend four days hiking and camping in the Adirondacks with ten other students. In other words, we were all about to get to know each other very well. And very quickly.

At dinner that first night, he seemed a bit withdrawn. Shy. I asked him about his summer job, and he told me that he'd spent the summer working in a cornfield in Ohio. To a girl from suburban Boston, he might as well have said he'd been harvesting ore on one of Jupiter's moons.

But, as it turned out, there were plenty of ways for two people from Ohio and Massachusetts to find common ground. Tom and I collapsed a tent together, laughing when the poles became impossible. We stared at the stars together, waxing philosophically as the night carried them across the sky. It turned out he had a girlfriend back home. I pushed any unspoken thoughts of romance aside and dug deeply into our burgeoning friendship.

We got back to campus, feeling exponentially wiser from our time in the mountains, and we became inseparable. He cheered for me when I started dating a guy I'd met in the college choir. Tom and I hosted dance parties in our dorm. We expanded our circle of friends, never wavering in our connection. We took walks in the rain and ate pints of ice cream. We still stargazed, until the snows took over, and then we gathered friends to go sledding on dining hall trays.

By the spring, my boyfriend and I had broken up. Around the same time, things were getting rocky between Tom and his girlfriend. As he navigated the pain of losing a first love, we had hours-long talks that illuminated our shared values and our hopes for our futures. And, by the time sophomore year rolled around, we realized that our friendship had morphed into love. Though, of course, I already loved him. He was my best friend. But now I saw him through a new lens, layered on top of the one that had become so familiar.

It was all so gradual. And tenuous, at first. We broke up briefly in October when the friends-to-lovers transition proved too overwhelming. When we reconciled a few weeks later, he told me, "I tried to stop loving you, but I couldn't." I mean, really! We never wavered again.

A year after graduation, we got married in the college chapel. We held onto a distant hope that, someday, we'd find ourselves back in this beloved place that had witnessed all the stages of our relationship. Two states and eight years later, he accepted a position in the computer science department at our alma mater. (And we can see the chapel from our house!)

Tom has believed in my writing since the beginning, encouraging me to pursue my dreams and rooting for me at every step in the process. Our story spills into my novel, moments and lines lifted right out of our lives. He's not Seth, not exactly. But their kindness and their gentleness are so similar. They're both steady, patient people, who exude compassion and bring laughter into everyday life.

And, so, I had to write a post about him. First day of college meet-cute and all!