Ten years ago today, after spending a decade dating over 200 men through the personal ads, I stepped onto a path near my home and met the love of my life.

No, this isn’t one of those “I looked everywhere and he was right under my nose” kind of stories.  I actually met K. after he answered my personal ad, the one that I had determined would be my “going out of business” announcement before giving up entirely on that method of looking for love.  

For K., it was entirely different:  I was the first and only person he ever dated through a personal ad, one he spotted in the newspaper while looking for something else and answered almost on a whim.

For me, meeting K. was a vindication of an exhausting and seemingly endless process of putting myself out into the world for repeated disappointment and even humiliation, all in the quest to find what I wanted so much:  a loving life partner.  That it occurred just as I was about to cashier the process made it that much sweeter:  I felt I’d been rewarded for my extreme persistence in the pursuit of love, a pursuit that had taken me through countless singles events and groups, as well as those hundreds of personal ad encounters.  

Over the years, my attempts to go out and find love had led to relationships -- some disastrous, some promising -- but none with any man I could truly imagine spending my life with.  By the time I came to stand on that trail with K., I’d been through the dating wars, and I had the scars to prove it.

But during those same years, K. had been in an entirely different world:  marrying, becoming a father, surviving a difficult divorce, and then, after that, a love affair that had left its own wounds.  Throughout his life, he’d dated very little, never being one for casual relationships of any kind.  If it wasn’t a deep connection, he wasn’t interested.  

And so we came to meet, veteran and virgin of the dating battle, at the head of a path leading into the woods, each trembling but for different reasons.  I because I’d been disappointed so many times; he because he hadn’t, and had already fallen a bit in love with me from our email exchanges.  He confessed later that he expected a “love at first sight” experience, an instant chemistry that fulfilled the meeting of minds and hearts we’d already experienced in writing.  

Soon however, he was instead crest-fallen, as my nervousness took the form of a tight shyness, a complete constriction of what had enamored him in the first place, and he wondered where that woman was that he’d been so eager to meet.

I, for my part, had the opposite feeling:  That this was exactly the type of man I’d been looking for all these years – and by that point I had long, hard experience to know it when I found it, and I didn’t want to lose it.  

But therein lay my problem – I was paralyzed by the thought of getting my hopes up once more only to be disappointed, even crushed, as I had been so many times before.  The very fact that K. was even more appealing in person was my downfall.  I knew what stood before me, and I literally trembled.  My nerves enclosed me in a stiff protective shell, one that persisted even as we wound our way up and around the gentle path through the trees, me shooting quick glances his way, he turned more fully towards me, trying to find the woman he had expected to meet.  Inwardly, I was teeming with emotion and romantic hope, but outwardly I was cool, even aloof, the long-practiced façade in place, as if I were interviewing for a job.

It was only more than an hour later, when we finally stopped to sit across from each other in a nearby park, and drink cool bottles of water, that I could finally face him, and begin to relax a little, and he could see that perhaps inside all my fear was someone he wanted to know, after all.  By the time we parted, he wanted to make the all-important second date, and I walked away hugely relieved and happy, not knowing yet how close I’d come to losing him entirely.  

That information would come a few days later when we had a long and tense phone call in which he confessed that he wasn’t sure about seeing me again.  In a supremely rational tone, I talked about the awkwardness of dating strangers, explaining that what we’d experienced wasn’t rare for these types of dates, but he still sounded reluctant.  It was only when I felt things were hopeless and said, my voice just beginning to break, “I don’t want to lose the chance to know you,” that he melted.  “That’s the kind of thing I was hoping to hear,” he said in a warm and happy voice, meaning less the sentiment than the vulnerability I was finally revealing.

It was at that moment that I began to realize that I’d finally met a different kind of man, not like the ones I’d been involved with before, who valued my cool self-sufficiency, who appreciated the fact that if anything, I took care of them, and asked for so little.  Here instead was a man who truly wanted to know me, to feel me crack open my heart for him, not just once but again and again, in order to be able to love the me inside.

It’s not something that comes easily for me, even now.  The wounds that make me self-protect are lifelong and deep, and even with all the work I’ve done to heal them, they still exist.  But each day with K. is a bit of salve on them, a reminder that some people can be let in safely.  Not that they won’t ever hurt or disappoint you – they’re human, after all – but that with them the risk is far less than the sweet reward.

Over the years, we’ve both had many occasions to feel doubt and fear about our relationship, and yet even at times when it has seemed hopeless, we’ve always stayed together.  I used to describe the first few years of our relationship as a repeated process -- both figurative and literal -- of one of us saying, “This can’t work,” followed by both of us moving our chairs closer together.  

Having found the man I’d been seeking for so long, and not having been through a marriage and divorce, I was far more ready to partner than he was, and wanted to live together long before the seven years it took for us to reach that milestone.  But my desire was mixed with ambivalence at the risks of intimacy, and K. for his part continued to press me to shed the armor that had been my lifelong companion.  

Today our commitment is as strong as we both could want it to be, and when people ask us why we choose not to marry, implying it would be a further step, we just smile and shake our heads, knowing how deeply we are in this together.  And yet emotionally, there is part of us that returns again and again to that first date:  I’m afraid he won’t stay with me on the path, and he worries that the real me won’t show up at all.  But we keep on walking, side by side.

Just the other night, as we lay spooned in bed with K’s arms loosely encircling me, drifting towards sleep, he teased me (as he often does) about not trusting people more, not even him, not even ten years on.  

My eyes welling with sudden tears, I whispered, “Don’t give up on me.”  

It was something that K. had said to me in those early difficult years, when he wasn’t ready for the type of relationship that I was pressing for, but didn’t want to lose me.  He wasn’t the kind of man to give false assurances, and the very fact that he wouldn’t make a commitment that he wasn’t ready for was a huge part of what I loved about him.  So I took those five little words to heart. I didn’t give up on him, and eventually he was ready for me.

I doubted that he remembered any of this, though, and when I said the same words to him, he answered with surprise, “I’m not about to give up on you,” and gave me a reassuring squeeze.

And with that, we fell into the soft darkness of sleep, holding on to each other long past the point of conscious knowing.