When She Knew: Self-consciousness Melted Away

You didn’t strike me as a cult leader.

It had to be the worst opening line in the history of opening lines. What was I doing? Sending a Facebook message to a man I barely knew was both out of character and way out of my comfort zone. I listened to the rush of my heartbeat and stared at the little green dot next to his name, Jacob, at the top of the screen.

Two years earlier, he and I had met at a mutual friend’s wedding. I thought he was cute, but nursing the wounds of a recent breakup made me self-conscious and bitter about my prospects. Surely he would be more interested in one of the bridesmaids who were all but lining up to dance with him. I felt like “not good enough” was stamped onto my forehead, more obvious than the flower crown I was wearing.

Later, we’d bumped into each other again at a party. Or rather, I casually slid into an empty seat at the table where he was discussing philosophy with another mutual friend. I spent most of the meal trying not to stare at the handsome guy across from me, but my attention was finally (genuinely) drawn elsewhere when our friend asked about my senior capstone. While he and I chatted about my paleontology research, Jacob was polite but seemingly uninterested.

Jacob and I had barely exchanged half a dozen words on either occasion, yet I’d learned—through observation, an overheard conversation, and insight from our friends—that he was attractive, intelligent, upstanding, and somehow single. There was no way he’d be interested in me, I thought. 

Over the following years, my heart limped through several unrequited crushes and two relationships that felt wrong from the start. Jacob occasionally crossed my mind, like the idea of visiting the moon might cross the mind of an amateur astronomer: beautiful, but out of reach.

Now, suddenly, he’d commented on a post I’d shared on Facebook. It was a tongue-in-cheek list of careers for each Myers-Briggs personality type, and apparently, his type made him prime cult leader material. (Mine, meanwhile, indicated that I’d be a perfect cackling old sea hag.) Doubtful that he even remembered who I was, berating myself for the ridiculousness of my opening line, but unable to ignore an internal nudge to reach out . . . I sent him a message.

I don’t remember much cackling coming from your end of the table, he wrote back. We dove into a conversation about personality types, which I pessimistically expected to fizzle out quickly. He was just humoring me, I told myself. Sure enough, we had nearly exhausted the topic after a couple of days, and I braced myself for the letdown. Instead, he sent me another message:

Sorry, this is off-topic, but do I recall that you studied paleontology?

“I’m going to marry him,” flashed through my head like a neon sign, immediately followed by more rational thoughts. At the very least, he wasn’t just humoring me. He had been paying attention to me, listening to my conversation at the party as much as I had been listening to his. And he definitely remembered me, not just as a vaguely familiar face, but in a personal way.

Our conversation turned to dinosaurs and then to other topics without fizzling once. Discussing our shared interests gave way to discussing our shared values and hopes for the future. After a month, Jacob made the three-hour drive to see me in person. My heart stopped for a second when I saw him walking across the museum parking garage where we’d agreed to meet. What if he wasn’t the man I thought he was? What if I wasn’t the woman he thought I was? What if I still wasn’t good enough?

By the end of that first date, the flash of premonition I'd had when he asked me about paleontology didn’t seem so irrational. He was even more intelligent and virtuous than I had realized. He was also hilarious. I didn't care that everyone in the restaurant stared when he made me cackle like a sea hag during dinner. I had spent so long worrying about how smart I sounded, how beautiful I looked, and how loudly I laughed, but those things didn’t seem to matter anymore. I realized that I didn’t just feel “good enough.” I felt like I was exactly where I was meant to be.

Later, Jacob (who is, by the way, not a cult leader) shared that he’d noticed and liked me the first time we met. He even remembered little details, like the flower crown I wore to our friend’s wedding. But simply being noticed and admired was not enough to make me say yes when he asked me to marry him. Premonition aside, I knew I could say yes to Jacob because getting to know him didn’t just feel like falling in love (although there were plenty of butterflies and racing heartbeats involved); it felt more like finding my long-lost best friend.

As awkward as I had felt when I first messaged him, my self-doubt melted away when we were together. There wasn’t any of the usual awkwardness between us either. Other relationships had felt like mismatched puzzle pieces: as hard as I tried to make myself or the guy I was dating fit into an arbitrary mold, I could never fool myself for long. With Jacob, I was so busy enjoying his company, it never crossed my mind to worry about whether or not we were a “perfect” fit.

After almost four years together, including two years of marriage, the idea of puzzle pieces seems a little silly to me now. Human beings, in all of our beautiful and sometimes messy complexity, are not two-dimensional pieces of cardboard. Jacob and I weren’t factory-produced to fit together, and there are many ways in which our opinions and preferences differ. But I don’t need to tally our similarities versus differences to convince myself that he really is “the one.” 

Jacob continues to be my best friend, buoying me up through the challenges of getting married during a pandemic, starting a new job, buying a house, and becoming parents. Not a day has passed since our first date that he hasn’t made me feel more than good enough.

Our story is more complicated than pieces falling perfectly into place. The question “what brought you together?” has many possible answers: friends, a Facebook post, shared interests, life circumstances, fate, a higher power. But what ultimately binds us together, what makes Jacob the one for me, is a series of intentional choices: to send that nerve-wracking first message, to ask for and then drive three hours for a first date, and to promise to love each other until death do us part, and every day in between.