15th Anniversary

By coincidence, this year is a bunch of milestones in my family. My parents will be marking their 45th wedding anniversary, my big sister's been married for 20 years, and my little sister's 15th is coming at the end of the year. The vacation we recently went on together was (in part) a joint celebration of those events.

It also would have been my 15th anniversary. Today.

Andy and I never got married (even unofficially), so like many not-fully-committed couples, we marked time based on our first date. It was a date (the day and month) that turned out to be easy to remember: the 3rd of July.

The date itself was also memorable in other ways. For one thing, we didn't kiss. Not because I'm "not that kind of girl" or anything, but because Andy had a throat infection. Nothing serious, but Andy took "safe sex" very seriously, so mouth-to-mouth contact wasn't an option. I suppose I could have kissed him {ahem} elsewhere, but I'm not (or at least I wasn't) that kind of girl. Instead, at the end of our date (which we spent walking around downtown Grand Rapids, with me showing him the sights... both of them) sitting in his car, holding hands. Which was by far the most intensely erotic hand-holding session I've ever experienced. And a lot more friendly than just shaking hands.

That was a very long time ago. I was a young man of 24 years, and Andy was only a kid, just turned 20. He'd been around the block a few times, dating-wise. I wasn't a virgin or anything, but he was the first person I seriously "dated" (meaning that we spent time together, fooled around frequently, and both saw it as a developing relationship). In the time since then I've lost a bit of hair, gained a bit of weight, and gone through a lot of experiences.

One thing that makes this particular anniversary significant is that it marks a kind of double milestone: it means I've spent about as much time after Andy as with him. It's hard to put an exact date on when I "lost" Andy, because the process took several months, beginning with his brain hemorrhage and ended with his father decreeing that I couldn't see Andy any more. But in the middle of that, I flew down to Georgia to visit him at his father's house in January 1997, and marked the 3rd as our 7.5-year anniversary. It was on that visit that it became evident to me that Andy wasn't going to recover to any meaningful degree. It's been 7.5 years since then.

I've known for quite a while that this would happen, that those 7.5 years - which seemed so vast and loomed so large at the time - would eventually dwindle into a small fraction of my life, a long time ago. This is the first time I've had to face the fact that it's already happened.

I do still count those 7.5 years as very important, life-changing ones, and Andy was the largest factor in those changes. He affirmed me, challenged me, and enriched me in ways no one else has. He got me to open up to another person like no one before had managed. I wouldn't be the person I am today without him, and that's a very good thing.

My life didn't end when I lost Andy (and a good job and another good friend) that year. Although I've sometimes quipped that the good part did. I've often worried that I'd never get over losing Andy, and that I'd spend the rest of my life miserable. Which hasn't really happened. There's been a lot that sucked about the past 7.5 years, but not all of it. I got a second college degree (and learned a lot of neat stuff in the process), I got to know some interesting new people, and I now have a job that I'm enjoying almost as much as the one I lost in '97.

I'm alone again, and it seems likely that I'll stay this way. But it's not as bad as I thought it would be, and it's definitely not as bad as if I'd never actually been in a relationship. I can respect myself better knowing that I was (apparently) worthy of a boyfriend, that someone really did love me that way. So it really is better to have loved and lost, rather than never being in love at all. It means that being alone is now a choice, not simply a failure.

I still miss him. I wish he could have been with me on that trip to Alaska... or even just to see Spider-Man 2. I sometimes wonder how my life might have been different with him in it over the past 7.5 years, and here with me today. And I wish we could actually celebrate 15 years together tonight. But we can't. So instead I'm simply going to celebrate the 15 years since he held my hand and changed my life... forever.