Jeff (of tinmanic.com) notes that today is the anniversary of his first date with Matt. As I noted in my congratulatory comment, the two of them are terrific people individually, and terrifically suited to one another as well. Jeff writes:
I've never met anyone else with whom I've clicked so well. We don't even need to be doing something exciting; even if it's just an ordinary day, and I'm sitting on his couch reading the Sunday paper while he types away at his computer, it's so comforting to be around him. We joke that we're like an old Jewish couple, making sure each other's stomachs are feeling alright, sometimes yawning too early on Saturday nights. We just mesh.
When commenting on his post, I didn't want to shift the focus from them, but reading his words resonated so strongly with me that I wanted to follow up here. I could easily have written that quoted paragraph above, save perhaps the line about being "like an old Jewish couple," though we absolutely note the same synchronicity of mind and soul implied by that comparison, and the same comfortable ease in the ways we live and relate with each other.
It's uncanny, in fact, the way [my] Jeff and I so often will say the same thing at the same time (heh, I even read and replied to [the other] Jeff's post just a few minutes after [my] Jeff did, which kind of coincidence isn't uncommon for us), or react the same way or with the same reference to something we see or hear. It's perhaps even more amazing given that the ubiquitous "they" would tell us that we're at least a generation--perhaps two--apart, and shouldn't be able to so readily communicate and understand one another. And yet I've rarely felt quite so connected at any single level--emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, physically--with my chronological peers, much less at all four of those levels as I do in my relationship with Jeff.
The other Jeff also noted his experience with a relationship truism, with which I also largely identify:
I'd always wanted a long-term relationship with someone, but I wasn't expecting it to happen when it happened. I guess that's how these things work: you never know when you'll meet that person, or how.
I'll take that one step further in my own case, though. Not only wasn't I expecting a relationship when Jeff and I first started communicating on and through our blogs, nor expecting a relationship to happen at that time, I'd pretty much given up on expecting it ever to happen and, at a conscious level at least, even hoping for it. After a particularly unpleasant dating experience for a few months early in 2002, after cycles of decent-enough but ultimately dissatisfying and impermanent relationships alternating with months to years of solitude, I'd finally decided I might really be better off and happier alone, and was comfortable with that realization. My experience of the last year and a half, though, has shown me--happily--that I was wrong. Maybe I had to wait a particularly long time for the right man and the right relationship to come along, but he and it have been well worth the wait.
