Once Upon A Time...

Today is the 19th anniversary of my first date with Michele, which I remember because I am married to a person who is absolutely a fanatic about birthdays and anniversaries.  It is a date I remember because I, actually we, did nearly everything we could to torpedo the whole experience, and therefore it is no minor miracle that we actually ended up getting married.  My dating history, up until June 27, 1997 was checkered to say the least.  I blamed it on lots of things, crazy girls mostly, which is partly true, but the deeper truth is that I was simply not very good at the whole process of what some will call romance and others will simply call mating.
I suppose I watched too many John Hughes movies, like many an eighties kid.  If you judge by my behavior (I can't claim to remember what was going on in my mind) I expected the prom queen to mysteriously recognize that I was, in fact, the catch of the century, and then utterly transform herself into my ideal woman. There was an episode of Star Trek, which I believe sort of summed up my expectations, it's called The Perfect Mate.  There is a woman who is what they call a metamorph, her name is Kamalah and she is being given as a gift of peace between two warring worlds.  She is stunningly beautiful and has the rather handy attribute of being wired to sense whatever the nearest male really wants and then to shape her very self to that idea (fantasy maybe?).  The idea is that she is supposed to form a permanent bond with her life mate at a very specific time and then become, forever, his "perfect mate."  Of course, things do not go according to plan, and Kamalah ends up bonding with Picard rather than her intended, which of course sets up a rather bittersweet resolution where Picard and Kamalah have to choose between love and duty.  It is complicated by the fact that Picard, representing modern human values, finds the very notion of giving a person as a gift morally repugnant, and also the fact that, unlike it was for James T. Kirk, the galaxy has not proven to be one enormous snog palace for Jean Luc Picard.
Anyway, Picard and Kamalah make the "right" choice, meaning the choice that doesn't prolong a conflict between two worlds, but which denies the two of them the happiness that was obviously supposed to be implied by a metamorphosis of one person into the "perfect mate" of another.  That is apparently what I was actually expecting the whole process to be like, to find a woman who was compatible with me, who liked the same things, who sort of mirrored my thought patterns, who was my perfect mate.
So, when I was thinking about where to take Michele on our first date, it was obviously to the new John Woo movie, Face Off, starring Nick Cage and John Travolta, how could that possibly go wrong?  I mean this is John Woo, of The Killer, and Hard Boiled, Taiwanese action movies that are just, well amazing.  In Hard Boiled there is this scene that takes place in a hospital between two guys, they get they end up at both ends of a hallway filled with frightened patients, and you think (because you're used to American movies) that they're going to move the violence elsewhere, but no, they don't, they just start shooting up the whole place, innocent people and all. That's John Woo, at least in his original form, willing to go over just about any line.  As it turns out, John Woo was capable of being corrupted by Hollywood, and Face Off was not a very good movie.  But it was an even worse decision, because I did not yet understand that my wife to be is a sensitive soul, who would probably not have liked The Killer or Hard Boiled, even if she did like Chow Yun Fat in Anna and the King.
I also did not fully comprehend that she was nervous as all get out, because she had been trying to get me to go out with her for a while, and I had been almost comically oblivious.  I also did not know that she had not eaten very much at all that day, before we went and had a couple big sugary cappuccinos before the movie.  I also did not know that she didn't really drink coffee or very much caffeine at all.
There were several times in the evening when I thought she might be sick.  By the time I dropped her back at her house, I pretty much figured that would be the end of us.  I had unintentionally sabotaged our date, and was prepared for her to decide that I was not, in fact, her perfect mate, because that's mostly how this goes: you mess up something that bad, you are not "made for each other" obviously.  But she wanted to go out again, and this time I had learned some lessons, no more ultra-violence, no more being oblivious to the fact that there was another person who is different from me involved in this relationship.  It was an important lesson, and a lesson that I continue to learn after nearly two decades of togetherness.
We have now both learned that we like different things. I don't make her watch Game of Thrones and she doesn't make me watch Nicholas Sparks movies, it's just better that way, it doesn't mean we're not compatible, we're just not like that poor creature on Star Trek who had to form herself into whatever someone else wanted her to be. When we do agree on things, it makes it all that much sweeter to be able to enjoy something from our different perspective.
Diversity in an ecosystem generally means that the system is more stable, more resistant to disease, more able to absorb trauma and maintain it's health, I think that holds true for families as well.
Happy First-Date-a-versary Michele.