All of a sudden all of that waiting I mentioned below seems to be near an end, the steps now under my control. It turns out the gestation period for the mid-life phase change is approximately twenty months. Within another month, my wife and I should be finally situated as we planned back in July 2009. We had talked constantly to each other for months, and within a day or two after meeting in person, we felt married and already knew what we wanted. People would ask us how long we had been together, and all we could do was laugh. We knew each other better than anyone else knew either of us. We felt like newlyweds on a honeymoon despite the fact that we only had a couple of weeks together while she prepared for deployment to Iraq. (Luckily they shipped her to training at Fort Benning before she deployed. Otherwise we would have had to wait through the deployment having never held hands). I bought her ring the third day together. But we couldn't possibly say that we had been together for just a couple of days. People would think we were crazy. And maybe we were. We certainly didn't know how much effort it would take, but we knew we wanted a new life together.
There was an episode in a restaurant. We had another soldier with us, and the three of us were eating and innocently chatting.. At some point, with her napkin, she wiped some food or something off of my lip and I just kept talking. It was nothing. But this waitress saw it and decided to come sit with us. She said she watched couples all the time and could tell the ones that would last. She sat there explaining this for twenty minutes or so. We tipped her over 100%.
I'm knocking on wood. Cautiously optimistic, as they say. But happy.
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