Eat, Drink, and Be Married

This is Part 2 of a piece written for a friend’s daughter about the road to finding love. Read Part 1.

Regardless of my growing love interest, I was still planning to travel around the world. Darren encouraged me, sending me ideas and resources that would help me on my way. Eventually, though, our daily conversations began to include him in my travel plans. I was surprisingly OK with that. Even though my vision had been to venture out on my own, I loved Darren’s company, and any trip would simply be more fun with him there. Sometimes our travel plans included working on organic farms in different locations around the world. Sometimes they had us living in his dad’s cabin in rural Arkansas and teaching ourselves survival skills.

In spite of my glamorous fantasies of riding a camel to see the pyramids of Egypt, when I was really honest with myself, I knew that I didn’t want to go gallivanting around the world. I had recently left a stressful job and had put myself through six intense months of making peace with my past. What I really wanted to do was to relax and put down roots. Darren happened to live in the South, one of the best places in the world to put down roots. If I moved there, we could finally live in the same city and curb our expensive cross-country flying habit.

Although I would never, ever have thought that I would do this, in January of 2009, I moved to Mississippi. For a guy.

I’d always been the type to believe that things wouldn’t happen unless I made a big effort to do them myself and control the outcome. This time, I didn’t even try. Instead, I trusted my instincts and simply got out of the way, and voila, incredible things began to happen.

Once I settled into Jackson, I found that many of the pieces that I’d envisioned for my ideal life slowly came into being. I started writing for a living. Darren and I built a garden bed outside our apartment and grew our own organic produce. I taught myself how to play the guitar. Suddenly, I realized that I was living a lifestyle that could be called “balanced”: cooking at home, exercising and sleeping enough, and laughing a lot every day.

It astonished me that once I stopped striving for all of these things and just let my life unfold, my dreams seemed to materialize, one after the other. I began to check off items from my New Year’s vision collage: a bigger apartment, better financial stability, and travel to beautiful places: China, Israel, and Puerto Rico (my employers even paid me to go).

Two years to the day that we met for the second time at Mardi Gras, Darren and I got engaged. Even though I never would have thought that I would marry a college friend of my little sister, it’s impossible to imagine a more ideal match for me.

Back when I was a city girl, I had big, important plans and no intention of letting anyone change them – especially some guy. But the joke was on me. Love had other plans. And as it just so happens, they turned out much, much better than if I had made them myself.

Tags: 7 Comments