A photo of Russ and I around the time we started dating
One of my fixations is the passage of time. I’m fascinated by how time works, how long things have gone on, how long ago things were, etc.. I think about it a lot. The area of my life that I tend to most think about the passage of time in relation to is my relationship with my husband, Russ. I’m often just totally astounded by how long we’ve been together. I don’t know why I find it so fascinating, but I really do.
This morning, work is kind of slow, and my mind started to wander to that particular fixation - the passage of time. On a whim, I looked up how many days old I am:
A screenshot telling me that I’m 14,275 days old.
Then again, quite randomly, I decided to divide that number by 2, just to see what half of my life ago was.
A screenshot of my calculator, telling me that half my life ago was 7,137.5 days ago.
I figured I wouldn’t count half days, and rounded up to say that half my life ago was 7,138 days ago. Then, to figure out what the halfway point of my life is at this point, I went on Google and did some math.
A screenshot of a Google search, telling me that 7,138 days after the day I was born is April 11, 2005.
What is absolutely nuts … just mind-blowingly weird … about the fact that this particular fixation popped into my head today is that Russ and I started dating on April 12, 2005. If the halfway point in my life is April 11, 2005, that means that today - the day I randomly decided to see the halfway point of my life when I’ve never done this particular random search before - I found out that the halfway point of my life is the day before Russ and I started dating. So tomorrow, Russ and I will have been together for half of my life.
Why did I decide to look this up today? I have no idea, it just kind of popped into my head as a thing to do. This was not premeditated, I had no idea that half of my life ago was the exact time that Russ and I started dating. It was just a random search, a random sequence of weird thoughts popping into my head, that led me to this discovery.
I LOVE that this happened today. I think it’s amazing that my brain went to this random place and it turned out the way it did. I think that is WILD, and I am so incredibly charmed by the fact that this nutty part of my brain went on this journey.
Russ and I met in 2003, the year I started college. We got to know each other through our shared experiences with Campus Ministry at our college, as well as our involvement in the LGBTQIA+ group (then called a “GSA” for “Gay/Straight Alliance”) on campus. I was dating someone on and off for the first year and a half of my time in college, but during one of those off-periods, Russ and I went on our first date, on Election Night 2004. It was a great date, but I was still hung up on the guy I had been dating, so Russ and I chose to be friends. Eventually I got wise and ended the relationship with that person, and on April 12, 2005, I confessed my love to Russ in the dining hall at our college in a super dramatic way. He was dating someone else at the time (oops) but ended the relationship to start dating me. (The guy he was dating took it well and had seen it coming and was very sweet about it.) And the rest is history.
Russ and I on one of our early group dates at an ice-skating rink
This feels like the perfect opportunity to write about my husband. You’ll often hear people refer to their partner as their “better half”, and I’m not a huge fan of that phrase - I think people are individually whole, and that a couple doesn’t consist of two halves of a whole but of two whole individuals. That might be me being overly literal about the phrase …
ANYWAYS, today the term “better half” takes on new meaning. The half of my life since April 12, 2005 has absolutely been the better half. Getting to spend every day with Russ makes life infinitely better. He and I often talk about how much we’ve grown up together, and how we’re really very different people from who we were when we started dating, but that growing into those different people together has brought us so much closer and been so meaningful to each of us.
A recent photo of Russ and I in our house on the day we went to early vote.
The first thing that attracted me to Russ was his piano playing. Russ is a classically trained pianist, and the first time I saw him, he was playing piano for a service at our college. I thought he was so talented, and so handsome, and I knew I wanted to get to know him. The next thing that really struck me about Russ was how intelligent he was. I could immediately tell by talking to him that this was just an extremely smart person. He is so well-spoken, so eloquent, and has this incredible way of integrating theoretical and/or academic knowledge into real world scenarios and interactions. I feel like he was probably every college professor’s dream student, because he has this intuitive way of applying big concepts to everyday life. It’s really remarkable.
Once I got to know Russ, the next thing about him that I fell in love with is his mischievous side. Like I said, he’s REALLY intelligent, and between his intelligence and the way he played piano, I immediately thought that he was a really sophisticated, mature person. But getting to know him, I realized that he can actually be quite goofy, and his humor can even occasionally border on juvenile. He is the person who makes me laugh the most, and he has this perfect balance of old-soul brilliance and young-at-heart joy.
Russ and I have experienced so much together. I remember the first Christmas he spent with my family and my dad surprised him with a gift that was my dad’s way of saying, “You’re officially family now.” I also remember the soul-crushing grief we experienced together when we lost my dad. I can remember big fights between Russ and I (though those have always been few and far between). I can remember laughing so hard that we were crying and our bellies hurt. Russ and I have traveled to different states and even different countries together. We’ve worked through some of the hardest challenges. We’ve had two weddings - one that feels like the official one, and a second that made our marriage legal. We’ve shared friendships with some of the most amazing people you could possibly encounter. We’ve shared a deep faith that was the foundation for the relationship we built together. We’ve been together through our hardest moments and our most joyous moments. Tons of sing-alongs and dance parties, tons of inside jokes and knowing looks, tons of road trips - we have already shared so much together in this half of my life.
I truly believe there is no one as amazing as my husband. He is so kind, so sweet, so smart, so talented, so spiritual, so handsome. He has a heart for justice and cannot tolerate injustice anywhere. He is constantly learning, and - while life’s hardships could have hardened his heart - he cannot help but deeply love the most vulnerable people he doesn’t even know. He advocates tirelessly for the equality of people who are being denied equal status by institutions. He gives the most amazing hugs. He has the best smile, and it’s especially great when you can see in his eyes that he’s up to some “good trouble”. He has stuck by me through things that most people wouldn’t even consider sticking through. He has shown me that wisdom and wonder can coexist.
Russ in his element, playing piano in the chapel at our college for my sister’s wedding
2025 is an exciting year for the time-nerd in me. We will celebrate our 20th anniversary as a couple, our 15th wedding anniversary (with a trip to Ireland!), and our 10th legal wedding anniversary. Those feel like three big milestones to me. That every-five-years pattern feels especially cool when each of those anniversaries is a multiple of 5. (NERD!!) And I am once again struck with that sense of wonder at the passage of time and the longevity of my relationship with the incredible human being that is my husband. I feel so lucky that I met Russ when I did and that I’ve been able to watch him grow into the person he is, and that I’ve been able to grow into who I am in large part because of his influence on my life.
This is a fun day to mark. I love … just LOVE … that my quirky brain decided to look up the halfway point in my life, and that it just so happens that it means that I have spent half of my life with Russ. I love that I get the chance to commemorate this day with this post. And I love that I get to spend my life with the amazing person who I met all those years ago. I cannot wait to see what our future together holds.
I love you so much Russ. Thank you for spending half of my life with me.