Ten Years with my Debbie Dee

 

I can’t believe I’ve been with my wife for ten years. We got married in 2016, but we made sure it was on the dame date that we started dating on, in 2012.

2012 was a very different era. I was in Grad School. Deborah was a friend of my sister Erika’s. They had gone to school together, and I was four years older. She had just split up with her ex-boyfriend, and my sister played match-maker and set us up for a blind date. I had met Deborah on a couple of different occasions, when she visited my sister’s apartment, but I never expected that we would be together. My own love life had been nearly nonexistent before this; four years earlier I had a four month long relationship that had ended with us being incompatible, which I now realize since my diagnosis this year was because I was autistic, and she was neurotypical. Anyway for many years there was some doubt in my mind that I would ever be compatible with someone. I’ve always been socially awkward, shy and introverted. Being set up on a blind date by my sister was probably the only way I would have met the right girl.

Deborah had to deceive her father to come see me, because he was very overbearing. She lived in Stockton, California while I was going to school in Fresno, living in a dorm. She told her father that she was spending the night at my sister’s, and then my sister dropped her off at the Amtrak train station. I tried my best to be gentlemanly, offering to carry her luggage, giving her a kiss on the hand as she disembarked. It all went quite nicely. We hit it off from the get-go. The next year I rented us an apartment rather than a dormitory so we could live together. I proposed to her on our two year anniversary on a trip to the summit of Mt. Diablo, using a necklace I bought when I was in Armenia as we both preferred necklaces to rings. And in 2016, two years later, we were married. In the meantime I had to make a big decision, whether to follow her to Florida or not. And I did follow her there. We’ve been through thick and thin together these past ten years. We had our son together in 2019, after having been together for a little over six years. 

Deborah has been my guiding light all these years. She’s been an inseparable companion against life’s slings and arrows. We’re a team. It’s interesting to think how the decisions you make when you’re in your teens and twenties set the course for the rest of your life. And there’s no way to predict the outcomes. 

Anyway, we celebrated our tenth anniversary (the day after a hurricane at that, and not the first storm we’ve had to brave together in ten years) by going to a kratom bar, and getting kabobs at a Middle Eastern restaurant. We have a tradition of going out in our wedding outfits on our anniversary. After all why just wear it once? We also got some free baklava from the restaurant for dressing up.