THE MAGAZINE · THE ĖDITURE

We Found Each Other in Time

Cordelia on meeting her husband when they were both finally ready, and what she came to understand about love once the butterflies settled.

By Cordelia Garza

The day I met my husband, he asked me what I did. I told him: nothing. He asked again, very kindly, as if he figured there must be something I wasn't telling him. And I ended up explaining that I'd never worked, that I'd been terrible at school and that I had no intention whatsoever of ever working. A pretty thorough introduction. Honesty, I did not lack.

He has worked since he was fourteen. Imagine his face. For a moment he didn't know if I was serious. I was. We laughed, we kept talking, and some time later he told me that was exactly what he had liked: that I told him the truth without trying to seem like someone else.

I'd already had my relationships. I had learned things about myself and reached a point where I didn't feel like presenting myself as a woman I wasn't. It seemed better that he knew from the start who he was talking to. If he liked it, wonderful. And if not, at least we wouldn't find out after a huge effort to keep up a character.

I think we found each other at the right moment. If we had met years earlier, we probably would have seen something else in each other. I wasn't the same. Neither was he. We had lived enough to recognize something that might have slipped past us before.

Of course there were butterflies. So many. And that early part when everything about the other person seems charming. Infatuation has an impressive talent for making you see things the way you want to see them. Then the excitement settles and you start getting to know the person a little more clearly.

That's where I saw the things that really mattered to me. His values. How he treated others. His family. The way he took his work and what he wanted to build. We also saw our flaws, obviously. I didn't marry a perfect man, and he didn't get that lucky with me either.

But we liked what we found. And over the years we've discovered that we're good at different things. There are things that come easily to me and are hard for him, and others where I need his help. I like that we can recognize that without turning it into a competition. I don't need to do everything he does well. I have enough with my own.

I've felt supported to create, to chase ideas that at first not even I knew how to fully explain. My head is full of things. Projects, emotions, possibilities. He has helped me bring order to everything I imagined. I've also tried to take care of him and of the life we share. Our home and our family's peace matter enormously to me.

None of this means it has all been easy. The pregnancies, raising two daughters, moving cities, starting a project. There are stages that ask a lot of a couple, when you also have to learn to talk, be patient and accept that the other person doesn't work exactly like you do.

I don't want to tell the story of our marriage as if finding the right person meant you didn't have to do anything else. We've had to build it. What I value is feeling that there's someone with me while things happen. Someone who knows a part of me I don't have to explain from scratch.

And then there's the small detail of my opening statement. The woman who swore she would never work ended up, about fourteen years after getting married, immersed in a huge project and working like she had never imagined. I did tell him the truth when we met. I just didn't have the full information about my future.

That conversation still makes me laugh. And it also makes me feel so much tenderness. He met that Cordelia and has stayed by my side while I discovered other parts of myself. I thank God our paths crossed when we were able to recognize each other. We didn't know everything that was coming. I, clearly, knew very little. But how lovely to have found someone to discover it with.

— Corde