Ten years ago today, I went on a first date with the man who is now my husband.
All these years later, after the wedding and the mortgages and the kid, we refer to April 13 as Tiger Woods Day. This is because, on the day of our first date, Woods won his first Masters Tournament. I know this because my would-be boyfriend was, at the time, the sports editor at the Asbury Park Press, where we both worked. So while asking and answering those getting-to-know-you first-date questions and watching the Hale-Bopp comet streak across the sky over Long Beach Island, my date fielded cell phone calls all day from the copy desk.
So you can't say I didn't know what I was getting myself into.
Lucky for him, I already knew he was The One by the time he showed up at my apartment that day, bearing the most devastatingly handsome pair of blue eyes ever and a bouquet of roses -- only a half-dozen, as he'd guessed correctly that women figure a guy who arrives with a dozen roses on a first date thinks he's getting laid.
Fulfilling every romantic cliche known to womanhood, I realized that I had just met my future husband seconds after we were introduced, a few days prior. When it happened, back there by my friend Pam's desk in the features department, I didn't feel all lovey-squish, just relieved: Oh, there you are. What took you so long?
Even with all that, though, I didn't actually "fall in love" with John until some weeks later, aboard a British Airways jet out over the Atlantic Ocean. I was traveling alone, seated in the cheapest seat on the plane, next to an Israeli man so old and frail he needed help opening his Kosher meal (in return, he gave me his chocolates) and reading Vanity Fair to pass the time.
It was the May, 1997 issue, with Liv Tyler on the cover (yes, of course I saved it) and contained a lengthy excerpt of a biography of Clare Booth Luce, the social climbing writer and wife of LIFE magazine founder Henry Luce. It talked about how the two of them were charting seemingly unrelated courses through life, she as the Gal Fabulous of the pre-Depression New York literary world, he as the long-married, fairly bland editor of Time magazine, when they collided.
At one point, in a letter to Henry Luce, she writes:
"I have a flair for drama that might be more profitably confined to the pages of my manuscripts than loosed in my daily human relationships. . . . I am so afraid of happiness that let a perfect moment begin to unfold like a rose in my hand, and I instantly try to crush it. . . . Until I met you I never knew anyone who challenged enough of the real heart and mind of me to interrupt me in my emotional juggling."
Depending on how suspicious and cynical your view of love is, you could say she's either being ultra-coy or genuinely trying to warn a married man away from wrecking his home for her. Either way, by now he's dumbstruck with love (though not yet divorced). She tries another tack, sending him a lengthy "Domestic Questionnaire" meant to predict how well-matched their personalities are. It's here where his life experience and emotional maturity give him the edge, and it's how he ultimately wins her:
Q: If your lady suddenly takes it into her head to elope with a belted earl or an Egyptologist, will you pursue her with a poker and knock her gently on the head and nurse her tenderly until she comes to her senses?
A: Am not quite so dumb as to answer this one -- let the lady take her own chance of being left with her goddamned earl.
Q: Are you prepared to leave your lady a small inviolate section of her life concerning which you must ask no questions and will you be intelligent and foresighted enough to do the same?
A: Yes -- but you help me to this wisdom.
Q: Are you prepared for the worst?
A: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
