Dix ans, diez años, decem annis, dieci anni, zehn Jahre, Δέκα χρόνια, a decade ago… I was but a boy, she but a girl. I pursued, she hesitated. I persisted, she wasn’t persuaded. I was patient, she reluctantly gave me a chance. It started slowly, which was fine because I didn’t know what I was doing. Not that it was rough going, relationships aren’t hard, they just need time, communication, and a dogged determinedness not to indulge in childish games.
The early intrigue with one another was at it always is : the seduction of the unknown. We were intrigued with one another for the decided dissimilarity to anyone either of us had ever been with before – her with me because being even a hair above middle class sticks out around here – me with her because… well, what counterfactual ? I’d never met a girl who laughed at my subtler jokes and had the inherent curiousity and innate capacity to engage in intellectual discourse. So I chased her like I’d never chased anyone before, planting the seeds of success for a full year before tasting the fruits of my labour, and a decade later, I can say that my intuition in choosing her from amongst the scores of other girls in Undergraduate Sciences was right on the mark.
Many travels, incredibly few tribulations, a truly spectacular wedding, and a male heir later, and we’re barely the people we were when we started, and better for it. You can’t have a successful family, or a successful anything, if you don’t grow up and mature. She’s far more of a woman, I far more of a man, than when we met. There’s now a sharp schism where there was previously almost none, creating complementarity instead of just homogeneity.
A decade on and there’s no one who challenges my intentionally wild, often radical, usually unconventional, and downright eccentric perspectives quite like she does. She forces me to back up my adsorbed positions and reason my way through arguments that I’ve elsewhere found attractive, and if I can justify ideological absorption, take my stance and do something with it. She’s that good. So even if Plato’s Republic has now taken a backseat to Satoshi’s whitepaper in the annals of history, she’s still tops in my book. For without her, I’d be living in a monastery somewhere, growing older as I devoted my life to withdrawn asceticism and speculative thought. With her, I’m grounded and called to a life of action (even if often in the nebulous, sometimes abstract digital space).
With as much my head as my heart, which is so, so much more heart than I can even begin to describe : to many more, my love, to a great many more.