Do you believe in love's destiny?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

It’s amazing how some things work out…

In 1981 I had just started college, and in May I was living with my girlfriend just off campus. We were going to be married on May 1 but her grandfather was ill (he died soon after that date.) She was spending her time with her grandmother and family, so I stayed home for classes- it was near finals.

I helped a friend out by being a roadie for his wedding band. On this particular weekend the band played a prom after party one night and a wedding reception at a fire hall the next night. My job was mainly to haul and help set up and tear down the equipment, so I had idle time between being needed.

For the last dance, I got a request to dance with a high-school girl who had no date for her prom. I forget who asked me but I obliged. ( I did not attend prom at my school, so this was the only prom dance I ever had.) She thanked me, and I went to work and finished the job of loading out the band.

The next night, the wedding couple was one of the girl’s relatives, so she was there, along with her younger sister. I don’t remember but I probably danced with her again, but I remember talking to the sister outside the fire hall, standing next to the fire truck, for a long time. She seemed very interested in me, but I was nineteen, she was fifteen. I remember her long braids well. I didn’t pursue anything for the main reason that I had a GF- soon to be my first wife.

Fast forward to this week. My second divorce just cleared late last month, and my GF and I are doing well. We were talking about how we met, which was because she posted a pic of the old band that played at her cousin’s wedding, and I recognized them and commented- we started talking there, then we began dating. I remembered more of the story, including the conversation with the girl near the fire truck. It sparked a memory for her…

She found her journal, then called me back. Her sister was the one I danced with, and it was HER that I talked to near the fire truck. She even had my name in her journal! She called her sister and confirmed all this.

So, you just never know. I guess it was fate or some other power that brought us together again after thirty three years. We’ve been a couple vfor almost eight months but just found this out yesterday.

What do you think? We’ve had a feeling that we knew each other for a long time, and just found out it was true. Does anyone else have a story like this?

2

No.

3

That’s what I get for that title. At least it’s an honest answer.

4

No huge coincidences or anything, but my Mom recently rekindled a relationship with a man she dated when I was eight years old. Out of all the guys she dated/married he was the one I loved the most, the one who never hurt me, and I never really got over their breakup. I still have the Valentine’s Day card he made me when I was a little girl.

So now they are back in a relationship over 20 years later. She’s been living with him for a couple of years. Everyone’s lives pretty much fell apart after their breakup around 1990, he lost his best friend and spent some time in prison for DUI and my Mom married a sociopath who destroyed both of us psychologically, so it’s kind of a tale of two broken people putting themselves back together and finding each other. They both spent some time homeless and now he manages a homeless shelter. They’ve done some hard work of getting to a place where they can each have a healthy relationship. So their theory is that they just needed 20 years to work some stuff through so they could be right for each other now.

They live in the mountains in Colorado and he’s a biker. They are now both total adrenaline junkies who travelled over 15,000 miles this summer. They take hairpin switchbacks on the bike and don’t wear helmets and don’t care if they die having fun. They take off for destinations without even packing first and every day post Facebook pictures from amazing destinations all over the West. It’s a way different lifestyle than most people have, but it works for them.

I visited then in Colorado last month, and I got to see him for the first time in over 20 years. Talk about pressure. He was exactly as awesome as I remembered him being. He was absolutely stunned to learn what a tremendous impact he had on my young life. He never had kids so he said knowing he made a difference in my life made him feel like he gave something back to the world.

5

Basically, just about any good thing can be traced back to a chain of events, and if that chain had been broken at any point, it wouldn’t have happened.

I met my wife in a creative writing class. I was married to someone else at the time, and also unemployed. I didn’t want to spend the money to take the course, but my former wife urged me to do it. My wife-to-be wasn’t looking for a relationship and had always avoided dating situations. Since I was married, we were able to talk – I wouldn’t try to date her (she also liked what I was writing, including what would be my first published story). Then my marriage collapsed. The class had just ended, but the group decided to continue to meet. Meanwhile, I met the teacher, and managed to unload everything on her. She was friends with my future wife and told her I was available. One day, they decided not to meet, but they didn’t have my phone number, so I showed up. My wife was there, too, putting up signs that the class was canceled. We got to talking, and eventually I asked her out.

If any one of those events hadn’t happened, or happened differently, I would not have been married to the love of my life.

6

I don’t believe in destiny
Or the guiding hand of fate
I don’t believe in forever
Or love as a mystical state
I don’t believe in the stars or the planets
Or angels watching from above
But I believe there’s a ghost of a chance we can find someone to love
And make it last…

Rush and Neil Peart always have the answer. Always.

7

In reverse, a la a photgraphic negative of sorts…

I had a very close friendship with a girl when I was a teen-her Asian immigrant parents were a bit overprotective, and forbade any actual dating or such. But when we were together, we’d exist in this weird zone where we would read each other’s intentions without verbalizing it, finishing each other’s sentences, and just having a ball doing whatever. Elton John was the fave musical artist of the both of us, and a lot of our time was spent sharing music with each other. In various ways large and small it was pretty obvious that it was more than friendship-she once said I was more than a mere friend to her, but something less than a boyfriend, existing in this nether region as she said it…

Well, things went downhill fast when Daddy laid down the law on my ass (making various veiled threats if I made a move on her-an encounter I only found out about later, since I completely wiped it from my memory), and we quickly drifted apart (didn’t help that I was in a life crisis mode at the time, wracked by severe depression), and she left town to pursue her bachelor’s, and marry some other guy, and we lost touch.

I did meet him a couple of times-once my mom was there, and, being my mom (with no edit function between her brain and her mouth) she kept saying, “Oh! He’s just like John!” over and over…

Fast-forward 30 years, and she had uploaded some songs that she had recorded. I chanced to listen to one of them one day, and I recognized myself in the lyrics. She had taken not one but two incidents from our time together years ago, the details for each being very specific in the lyrics, along with another one from one that happened between myself and her best friend at the time (something said friend confirmed to me when I called her up a few months after my revelation).

Welp, very long story short, I tried to reconnect with her, and she coldly and completely blew me off, denying that we had shared anything of import years ago.

Didn’t matter, as by this time my life had become this swirling wonderland. Haven’t heard from her in 17 months now. Go figure…

8

I’m with Boyo Jim, but I’m reasonably certain that Destiny’s Child sang about love.

9

There’s a reasonable likelihood that my husband and I crossed paths (like ships in the night!) on the Gettysburg battle field in summer 1982.

Of course, I was two and he was eleven, so it would never have worked out. Then.

10

After I’d been living with Birdman a few months I found out, rather viscerally, that he was the weirdo that nearly threw up on me in a theater a year earlier. Truly he was my density.

11

Not everything works the way you think it should. It works the way its supposed to… and if you are very, very lucky, then its how you think it should be.

12

As always, there’s a song that expresses it perfectly: Tim Minchin - If I Didn't Have You - Full Uncut Version - YouTube

13

Fantastic.