An Unlikely Love Story (No one would have bet on this being the one...

Today’s freewrite prompt is Prototype

To be honest, I was pretty determined to write about my wedding to my Husband Patrick/@serapium today, because it’s our anniversary AND because it's a weird, somewhat funny in hindsight kind of story… but then this prompt made me write a little bit about the people we were when we got married. I guess I’ll write about the actual wedding tomorrow.

I’m sure when Patrick and I got married 24 years ago today, that most people who knew us assumed this would be the miserably failed prototype, the ‘let’s try out this marriage thing for a first try’ kind of thing that went out in a flaming explosion soon thereafter.

I can’t think of anyone who knew us, other than us (and even then, I’m not sure I had faith in it lasting. I’d never really known anyone personally who’d been married for a terribly long time.) who thought we would last.

Before you think that we were just surrounded by judgemental friends and family, and lest you think we had some sort of fairy tale romance… let’s back up JUST a bit and splash some reality on this picture.

Yes, we were absolutely passionately in love… BUT

After our Not So Romantic Beginning at the age of 19 which was Love at First Sight! according to Patrick, we had broken up due to many things I may write about later, basically youth, fear of committment and more fear. We were apart for three years and in those three years, neither of us made a lot of good choices.

When we got back together, nearly three years to the day from our break up, I was a single mom on the precipice of a mental/emotional breakdown, suffering from severe depression and things I wasn’t even aware of yet.. Patrick was a college drop out doing way too many illegal drugs and drinking way too much (although to be fair, he quit the drugs when we got back together, because that was a hard limit for me).

So, you can see that people MAY have had every right to think, “What the HELL are they thinking? I give it a month, two at the most!”

Oh, yeah, add to that the fact that we’d just had a miscarriage that ended with a fairly traumatic ER visit AND I’d actually finally had that emotional breakdown AND been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder. And that isn’t even the whole of it.

So… yeah. Who would EVER be thinking, “Boy, I bet these two stick it out for the long haul! They are such a stable, ready for commitment kind of couple!”