They met in a church basement in Wicker Park that smelled like burnt coffee and the musty rummage-sale items that were always out for the taking, home to daily twelve-step meetings. Could be fine, but he was newly sober, she was not. On paper it looked pretty obviously not promising. There’s a whole thing in their program literature about boy meeting girl on program campus having mixed results. Let’s be real right now. Girl meeting boys, cute actors once upon a time, on a program campus, is one of the key things that kept this girl coming back when she was new. Not dating in your first year of sobriety is just a suggestion. She was thirty years old at that time. So, not a girl. She had already wasted too much time. She hadn’t needed to drink over any of those cute actors, and they sure hadn’t needed to drink over her either.
Thankfully by the time she met her future husband, she had enough good sense to think about someone else’s sobriety, which brings us back to on paper. His presence in the room almost didn’t register with her for a while, but then one time he shared something she related to, something about your bad thoughts always seeming more believable than the good ones, and they became friendly, in the way that people do who chat after a meeting and then walk the fuck away because one of them is depressed and still struggling to get sober and the other is ten years sober and feeling way less shitty about herself than she used to, less shitty enough not to choose a newly sober dude who’s too young anyway. At this time she had a whole full life happening because she had taken the time to quit drinking and make better choices than she did when she was newly sober (go ahead and take it as a given that she made poor choices when she drank), and her first book was about to come out and didn’t leave a lot of time for probably doomed crushes on too-young depressed newly sober boys. Who smoked. Then one day when future husband had maybe six or eight months of sobriety, he smiled for the first time, or it was the first time she saw him smile, and a great smile has always kind of been her thing, and so she was like, Oh, that depressed guy is actually really cute, but she put that aside because of him being new, didn’t think much more about it, they talked after meetings once in a while, they talked at a sober picnic one time, later she went on a couple dates with a different younger guy, an even younger younger guy, here comes another, this guy was twenty-five and she was over forty; he’d written a sexy short story about her that made its way to her eyes, she got a mad crush because he was smoking hot in a way she ordinarily didn’t much care about, like he’d stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad in a fisherman sweater and thick blondish curls, with a gentle breeze and natural light and two yellow labs that found him wherever he stood, and so when you throw the sexy short story in on top of the sexy dude, forget about it. She was dunzo. Or dunzo for a week or ten days, before her future husband came along, which was around the same time. She had one date with sexy gentle breeze dude and then didn’t hear from him and spent some time wondering why and she knew she was too old for that waiting-for-phone-calls shit but wasn’t quite ready to hang it up either, meanwhile here comes future husband, with his depression and his new sobriety and his youth, and they started hanging out and then she had one more date with Breezy, and sitting across from his perfect face, in and out of whatever he was saying, all she could think was, I just want to be with that other guy. So that’s what she did. She went to be with that other guy, even though they were still just friends, and she had no plans to make any sudden moves and wasn’t sure if what they had could or should ever be romantic anyway, like we said, it didn’t look good on paper. He was a smoker. That alone had always been on her list of deal breakers. Actually at the time it was the only thing on the deal-breaker list. Her mom had died of lung cancer. Smoking is gross. Depressed young newly sober smoking guy called her later when he said he’d call her later, stopped by her apartment after work every other day just to say hi; one of those times, he tried to rescue an unwell baby bird on her back porch, gave it some droplets of water, warmed it up in his hands, this was probably the tipping point for her, sensitive dude who rescues baby birds, and he had pretty hair too, actually, soft and shaggy, and his eyes sparkled when he smiled, and then finally after a couple weeks of hanging out he came to take her to dinner at that place that used to be a train station, and he was wearing a nice wool shirt, and holding a bouquet of purple flowers, and it’s only then, a couple weeks into them hanging out, with the shirt and the flowers, that she realized he’d liked her the whole time. So one month shy of his one-year sober anniversary they officially started dating. I saw you across the room when I was new and I thought to myself, She is a stone-cold fox and when I get a year I’m gonna ask her out, he said. A year, eleven months, whatever, rules were made to be broken, she thought, especially when they’re only suggestions and anyway, don’t tell me what to do.