A few months ago, Stuart and I were driving back from Rhode Island and listening to Alanis Morissette. Shut up, I’m going somewhere with this. There’s this one song – seriously, it really doesn’t matter which one – where there’s this strange little tink in the middle of an otherwise rough and raucous chorus. Almost like the string on a string instrument was accidentally but forcefully plucked in the recording studio.
“It’s like, a balalaika or something.”
“It’s exactly like that, like someone just wandered through the recording studio, plucking a balalaika.”
“You know, Alanis probably had some boyfriend at the time, some guy who played the balalaika.”
“Totally – ‘please, Alanis, let me play balalaika for you, like this: PLINKY PLINKY PLINKY, come on, Alanis ‘.”
And at the same time, we said:
“And she’d be all, SERGEI…”
I nearly lost control of the car. We must have laughed all the way through New Haven. What are the odds, that in the same crazy imagining about Alanis Morissette and her troublesome Eastern European boyfriend with his goddamned PLINKY-PLINKY, we’d both land on Sergei, at the same time?
A few months ago, Barrie asked me something about marriage, what I thought makes Stuart and me tick. I told her that some couples are good for each other because they complement one another, like the perfect little black dress and the perfect slingback heels. Those couples find harmony in the ways they fill in each other’s gaps, even each other out.
Stuart and I, by contrast, are more like the two shoes. I think we’re basically the same person on a lot of very fundamental planes. This isn’t better, we don’t win some couple-similarity trophy, but it’s just the best way I can describe how twinned our ideas and emotions and reactions are, after knowing each other for such a comparably little amount of time. The reason that we did what we did, in that crazy way that we did it, was because neither of us really needed the sensible amount of time necessary to discover that you’ve found your complementary mate. Something essential in me saw exactly its twin in him.
The odds that we’d find each other are pretty much close to the odds that we’d both yell Sergei. When I think about that, my heart gets tight in my chest and I thank a God I don’t really believe in for the privelege of being where I am, every night. I don’t know how better to thank him for seven hundred nights together and nearly two years of marriage than to say life, in itself, is a marvelous thing – but the colors are brighter with him around.
with half-sincere apologies to anyone who doesn’t like the sappy stuff.
That was entirely beautiful, and may or may not have caused me to lose my shit up here, Krissa.
You two are gorgeous. Gorgeous!
my husband and i are the same way and got engaged after two months of dating. we just celebrated our second anniversary. i understand completely.
Oh, shush with the apologies. This is your blog and you can be as sappy as you want, whenever you want. That’s what makes it real.
Those moments are to live for
awwwwwwwwww
awwwww again!
I love the sappy stuff! My husband and I are more the black-dress-and-slingbacks model of marriage, I think, but your anecdote describes your relationship beautifully. It’s great that you take the time to appreciate these moments, and each other.
Thanks for putting it into words so eloquently. Just two weeks ago, Simon and I were driving through the English countryside and we saw a sign for “Compton.” We both read the sign silently and then said out loud at the same time in our best gangsta voices, “Word.” And then we laughed and laughed and laughed all the way home.
Leah, that shit is BANANAS. HAHAHAH.
That was so sweet.
i LOVE this post!
My boyfriend n’ I are more the opposite style – though something much less fancy than the perfect little black dress with the perfect slingback shoes – but still, there’s just something inside me that goes all warm n’ fuzzy when I know someone else in this crazy n’ mixed up world of ours has found their other shoe.