The new girl walks into her high school AVID class and sits next to a tall, skinny guy with lip piercings, ear gauges, wearing a Jack Skellington T-shirt. She’s a Marine kid and just moved back to the U.S. from Okinawa. Little does she know that he’s a military kid too and has gone to twenty different schools in sixteen years. The boy sees the new girl and thinks: “Who wears plaid dresses in high school?” He also thinks: “She’s kind of cute.” It’s not necessarily “love at first sight” but a friendship is formed and soon love blossoms between two people who genuinely like each other. They start dating and now, three years later, they are already talking about marriage and babies; not tomorrow, but when they graduate from UCSD in a few years. As I sit across from them for what was supposed to be a one-hour lunch, I ask them what they would say to people who are skeptical about their relationship because they are so young. Andrew responds: “I’d say that our age isn’t really a negative force in our relationship . . . we both grew up in the homes of high school sweethearts, so we don’t have much negativity internalized for young relationships because we’ve seen what they can grow into.” Both Savannah’s and Andrew’s parents have been married more than twenty years, and they tell me their parents still seem very happy. Nothing is perfect, they admit, but both sets of parents have served as models, “We learned from them to never go to bed mad. Work it out. Fight it out,” because “nothing should be big enough to come between us.” When I ask Savannah what she would change about Andrew she answers: Nothing. “I am not saying he is perfect,” but she tells me she loves him just the way he is. This young woman seems to understand something that took me twenty years to figure out: you can’t (and shouldn’t) change others. Accept them as they are—or don’t—because people don’t really change, not inherently, that is.
I start thinking about all the frogs I had to kiss till I met my charming husband. Can you kiss Prince or Princess Charming at sixteen and make it last “forever”? When divorce rates are at about 50% in the U.S. and finances are what cause most marriages to fall apart, can two young people who say that “in a few years, we may be struggling really hard to make rent on our rinky-dink apartment while paying off student loans, while providing for our cat, and maybe even our kid” make it for the long haul AND be happy?
Savannah was my student and is now my friend; she is a thoughtful, fun young woman who loves to read, play board games, and smile a lot. Andrew, who I just met, (though whose face I knew well through Instagram) speaks French, German, Spanish, and American sign language; he’s a lover of linguistics, a young man who speaks like an old soul using word choices like “salient” and “cognitive dissonance” while simultaneously telling me he loves Pokemon. After spending a few hours with them, it all makes sense. Funky, smart girl meets funky, smart guy. There’s chemistry, friendship, similar backgrounds and goals. So why shouldn’t it last forever? As we sit in the sun and eat Greek food, I hear them finish each other’s sentences. They smile warmly at one another, teasing the other while telling me personal stories. One of his “duties,” he explains, is to “wait for her to fall asleep and then take off her glasses.” She rebuts with tales of his forgetfulness, but in the end, it’s all laughs. As I listen to their stories, I can’t help thinking that these two may have, indeed, been separated at the beginning of time. I have come to believe that there is no single formula that makes love work. Sixteen or twenty-six, thirty-six or even sixty-six, when you kiss The One, I think you just know.
kimberlykrobeson 