Is every night out a date night?
Somewhere between being coworkers and being us, I ended up with keys to an apartment on the Upper West Side.
We met at work. We were friends who ate lunch together most days for about two years, and then we were more than that. That’s the origin story. There was no first date I can point to. We just became.
June 19 was our dating anniversary. Fifteen years. That’s nearly 40 percent of my life. I did the math a few times to make sure, and because I’m bad at math.
I don’t really know how to mark a dating anniversary when you don’t remember dating. We didn’t do the thing where you go on dates. There was no “talking” period or courtship period. We did the thing where you’re suddenly in each other’s lives so completely that the category stops applying.
The wedding anniversary in October is the one we celebrate properly. If we’re not somewhere far away, we’re at a special dinner, probably one with a tasting menu and wine pairing. The dating anniversary is more low key. We notice the date. We spend the day together — easier now that Juneteenth is a holiday — and we go out to dinner somewhere we already like. One of us says it at the table: Wow, fifteen years.
This raises a question I’ve been sitting with: is every dinner out a date night?
We go out to eat a lot (but not often enough). We love to eat. We try new places and we return to old ones and sometimes we end up somewhere because it was close and we were hungry. Is that dating? Is fifteen years of that… dating? What makes a “dinner out night” a Date Night?
I think at some point the question stops being a question. You’re not dating. You just are.
There’s a version of this essay where I say something about how R is my best friend and I love him to the moon and back, and I mean it, but I also don’t want to write that sentence because it sounds like a toast and this isn’t a toast. What I mean is something I genuinely don’t know how to say: I don’t remember my life without him. Not “I can’t imagine it” — I literally cannot retrieve it. He’s been there for 40 percent of my life. He was there when I finished grad school, when we both decided to pack up and move to Denver, when we traveled the world, when we got Kona, when my dad died, every time I got a new job, every time I was laid off from that job. The before-him era exists somewhere in my memory like all the times I visited Disney World as a kid. I know I was there, but I can’t really picture it.
We were friends before we were “we”. By the time we were more than that, we’d already seen each other on bad days. I already knew he annoyingly lets everyone off the elevator first, even if that means he’s standing in the way. He already knew I sing the guitar solo or other instrumental break of every song. There was no performance of a first date because we’d already skipped past it somehow.
Then keys to an apartment on the Upper West Side.
We’ve lived in about six places since then. That W 85th Street fifth-floor walkup (and our terrible landlord) is long gone from our lives. But that’s the closest thing I have to a beginning. Not a specific moment. Just: keys.
Fifteen years later, we go out to dinner and a show (an Iration concert, hi Kathi!) and we say the number out loud and it sounds made up. We’re not the people we were 15 years ago, not exactly. We’ve changed in ways that are hard to inventory — some of it together, some of it separately, some of it because of each other. Every version of who I’ve been in the last fifteen years had him in it.
That’s the thing worth noticing, more than the date.
(He promised me 50 years of marriage. We’ve got 40 of those years left.)
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