The daily prompt asked:
How did you meet your significant other?
Technically, I met mine long before he ever became my significant other.
Bridger had been my best friend for eleven years.
Eleven years.
We knew each other before there was an us. Before marriage. Before holding hands. Before that first kiss. Before either of us was willing to say out loud that maybe what existed between us had quietly become something more.
And for a long time, friendship was where it stayed.
He was married. I was in a relationship.
There had been moments, though.
Looking back, I suppose you could say I played a little cat and mouse with him. Bridger would ask me to go somewhere with him, and I’d say, “Yeah, that sounds fun.”
And I meant it.
I wanted to go.
But there was always that thought waiting in the back of my mind:
He’s married.
So I wouldn’t go.
There are lines you know are there even when nobody draws them on the ground.
And then came a Tool concert.
My brother had bought me a ticket, and Bridger kept dropping not-so-subtle hints that he wanted to go.
Around that same time, something happened that I still don’t know how to explain neatly.
I was meditating when I kept hearing the same words:
This is it.
Again:
This is it.
And somehow, I knew.
It was Bridger.
He was it.
So I invited him to the concert.
I met him, got into his car, and we headed out.
And I was nervous.
Lord, was I nervous.
Apparently my body’s chosen response to realizing I might be sitting beside the person who was about to change my life was to talk incessantly.
I talked and talked and talked.
I’m sure I covered enough material during that drive to qualify for my own podcast.
But underneath all those words was something I wasn’t quite ready to say.
This feels different.
Then we arrived.
We got out of the car and started walking toward the concert hall.
And Bridger locked his arm through mine.
That’s it.
That’s the moment I remember.
Not some grand declaration.
Not a movie scene.
Not a kiss beneath the stars.
His arm locked with mine.
We were just walking together, two people who had already known each other for eleven years.
But suddenly, I knew him differently.
Our arms were locked.
And I was hooked.
As romantic fate would have it, after all of that, we didn’t even have seats next to each other.
Apparently the universe has a sense of humor.
But separate seats weren’t going to stop us.
We texted each other throughout the concert.
Somewhere inside all that noise and music, something between us had become impossible to pretend we didn’t feel.
But it was afterward, back inside the quiet of his car, that the night really changed.
Bridger began talking to me.
Really talking.
This was my best friend of eleven years, and yet that night he opened himself to me in a way he never had before. He told me intimate things I hadn’t known. I saw pieces of him that had somehow remained hidden even after more than a decade of friendship.
There is a particular kind of intimacy in discovering that there are still rooms inside someone you thought you already knew.
On the drive back to my car, we held hands.
The whole way.
I don’t remember needing some big conversation about what it meant.
I think we both knew.
Eventually we reached my car.
The night was ending, but something else had already begun.
Before I got out, Bridger looked at me and asked:
“Can I kiss you?”
I said yes.
And then he kissed me.
I wish I could adequately describe what I felt in that moment.
I had been kissed before.
I had loved before.
I had lived an entire life before that night.
But I had never felt that.
The kiss didn’t create what was between us.
It confirmed it.
Everything I had been questioning.
Everything I had been trying not to name.
Everything inside me that had whispered this is it.
There it was.
And this is where our story becomes complicated, because life usually is.
We weren’t two unattached people who happened to discover love at a concert. Bridger was married, and I was in a relationship. Recognizing what was happening between us meant there were decisions to make, conversations to have, and consequences that belonged to real people.
I don’t want to rewrite that part of our story simply because the ending became beautiful.
Bridger told his wife he wanted a divorce.
I ended the relationship I was in.
And we decided that if this was what we believed it was, we were going to choose it.
We were going to choose each other.
Four years later, I married him.
Now we’re working our way through our second year of marriage and our sixth year of being partners instead of simply friends.
But maybe instead of isn’t quite right.
Because he never stopped being my friend.
After the concert, the confession, the decisions, the years, the wedding, the ordinary days, the difficult ones, the laughter, the worry, and all the life we’ve lived since—
Bridger is still my best friend.
Maybe that’s my favorite part of our story.
Love didn’t erase the eleven years that came before it.
It built upon them.
The man whose arm slipped through mine while we walked toward a Tool concert was already someone I trusted, someone I laughed with, someone I knew.
I just didn’t know yet what it would feel like to love him this way.
Or maybe some part of me did.
Maybe that’s why, before his arm ever linked with mine, before we ever held hands, before he ever asked if he could kiss me, something inside the quiet kept telling me:
This is it.
All these years later, I can finally answer back.
Yes.
It was.
