Reason #27 Why My Marriage is Just Like Yours

We have history.

My love story begins in a psychiatric hospital, which is just awesome, as far as I am concerned. I love to tell people that we met in a psych hospital...they tend to look at me like that one fact explains a lot. I graduated from college in 1994 with a degree in psychology. My plan was to eventually go to graduate school after taking a year off. I went back to my hometown in the interim and got a job at a children’s psychiatric hospital, working as a youth counselor with mentally disturbed children—mostly teenagers— in an inpatient, long-term program. I worked the day shift. My partner, Ruanita, worked the midnight shift, as she was in graduate school at the time studying to become a therapist. I knew Ruanita. At least, I knew of Ruanita. She was loud and boisterous and rumor had it that she was…shhhh…a lesbian. I remember the moment I first heard she was gay. I was sitting in Applebee's with my mom and her friend (who happened to be a gay man) when Ruanita walked by in the parking lot. My mom's friend leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “You know she's...gay....don't you?” I remember being intrigued. Lesbians were few and far between in my hometown. Those that existed were certainly not out about it.

As a closeted lesbian—not even out to myself yet—I found myself somewhat awed by this extroverted and unrestrained person. My polar opposite. Everything about her was everything I shied away from. She was everything in this world that made me uncomfortable. After about a year working in the hospital, I moved to the midnight shift and worked on the same unit as Ruanita. She and I were not exactly friends. For the most part, we ignored one another at that time. Ruanita was in graduate school, so spent most of her evenings studying. I was wondering aimlessly through life and spent my evenings playing Scrabble with Reggie—a nearly seven-foot-tall African American man who rarely said more than two words to me, but kicked my ass at Scrabble every single night. Ruanita and I were oblivious to one another. She had her books. I had my Scrabble board. I had not yet come out as a lesbian at that point and frankly, she scared me a bit. She did give me a ride home from work once, and I took the Indigo Girls CD in her car as proof positive that the rumors of her lesbianism were true. Then again, I had—since my freshman year of high school—known every single word to every Indigo Girls song ever recorded. So what did that make me?

Eventually, I decided that working at the psych hospital with obstinate and defiant teens was not really my cup of tea. Frankly, they got on my nerves. So I packed my bags and moved to Louisville with my sister, Amy. When I got settled in Louisville, I wrote a letter addressed to the team I had worked with at the hospital letting them know how I was doing and wishing them well. Actually, it was kind of a guilt letter. I was not the most responsible woman back in those days. Unbeknownst to me, my coworkers had bought a cake and prepared a little going-away party for me on my last scheduled night of work. I called in sick. Yea, I suck. I was feeling a bit guilty, so wrote them to apologize and say hello and maybe give them the impression that I was a tad bit less of a tool than I had seemed when I played hooky on my last night of work. For some inexplicable reason—it is still a mystery to us both to this very day—Ruanita responded to my letter. It was completely out of character for her, but she responded nonetheless. She was the only one of my previous co-workers to write me back. We became pen pals, of a sort. Exchanging letters about our lives and jobs and everything else imaginable—back when people still put pen to paper and mailed letters. It was while living in Louisville that I came out to myself and to Ruanita.

In early 1997, my sister and I visited a friend living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We fell in love with the Twin Cities and immediately went home to Louisville, packed our bags, and moved north. My correspondences with Ruanita continued. We became email pals. I did not have a computer at the time, so I would trek to the nearest library on a daily basis to email Ruanita. She would spend hours in her campus computer lab emailing me. We both became addicted to those emails. I could tell her things I could not tell anyone else. And she would do the same.

We also began calling one another. We would have lengthy conversations every night about our previous coworkers, our lives, our dreams, pop culture. Everything. Hours on end. This was before the dawn of cell phones and unlimited long distance. As a 20-something with little money and a developing addiction to Ruanita, I became quite acquainted with the Collections Department at the phone company.

In December of 1997, I went home to Kentucky for two weeks for the Christmas holiday. After spending a nice Christmas Day with my family, I headed to Ruanita’s apartment to visit her the evening of the 26th. She was adorable. All nerves. When I arrived, she was already well into a bottle of Jagermeister and admitted to having changed her clothes several times already before I arrived. We sat on the couch. We watched movies. We played footsies, but we barely spoke. Toward the end of the evening, Ruanita leaned over and kissed the top of my head. Extremely sweet. And weird. And sweet. I left that evening with the promise to call her "sometime" in the next few days.

I remember emailing my best friend from college that night. “She kissed me, Heather. On the top of my head. What does that mean??” Of course, I did not wait a “few days” to call her. I was not at all savvy about dating protocols. I called her the following morning to see what she was doing that very night.

Ruanita invited me to go to a local gay bar with her and some friends. I tagged along and let Ruanita buy me $1 shots of fruity concoctions served in test tubes. She spent all of her money, pawned $20 off of me, and proceeded to spend all of my money. We danced and laughed and had an amazing time. In the wee hours of the morning, as the bar was closing and they were kicking us out, Ruanita leaned over and asked if it would be okay if she kissed me. She did. It was as if I had never been kissed before. We drove back to our hometown that evening and dropped her friend off at her apartment. As we sat in her friend’s driveway, Ruanita turned to me, looking like a cool lesbian Lothario, and said, “So you’re coming home with me, right?” I stifled a laugh at her cheesy seduction act. But I did go home with her that night. And so it began.

I spent that night at Ruanita’s apartment and every night thereafter. We were inseparable for the entire remaining eleven days of my vacation. When it came time for me to head back to Minnesota, Ruanita drove me to Indianapolis to catch the Amtrak train north. We both cried the entire way home. As soon as I arrived home, she called me to say that she had purchased a plane ticket to come see me for Valentine’s Day weekend. We spent a wonderful Valentine’s Day sacked out on blankets on my living room floor. I gave her a silver necklace with a snowflake charm —to remind her of me and the time we spent together in frigid Minnesota. She gave me a plane ticket to come visit her, which I promptly scheduled for the following month. By Memorial Day weekend, we had had enough. I drove to Kentucky, helped her pack a moving van, and she left behind everything she knew and loved to move to Minnesota to be with me. Five months after our first kiss, we were living together. It probably would have been sooner had we not been separated by 750 miles. There is not even an infinitesimal shred of doubt we are lesbians, huh?

And the rest is history. We celebrate December 27th as our anniversary. This coming December 27th, we will celebrate fifteen years and three children since the first kiss that started it all. I truly believe that fate or God or kismet or the universe or —SOMETHING— was responsible for us finding one another. We should have parted ways when I left my hometown. We weren’t even friends. But something compelled Ruanita to respond to my letter. And something compelled me to write her back.

I love the seemingly random yet oddly predestined way we became a couple. I have to say, fifteen years later, I am still madly in love with us. I have no doubt that we are going to live happily ever after. It all began in a psychiatric hospital, and it’s been a wonderfully crazy ride ever since.

Out of all of the love stories in the world, I love our love story the most. If that is not a marriage, then I obviously do not understand the meaning of the word.