Q&A: How did you meet your husband?
Emily is a data nerd, but at one point she was a "date-a-nerd"
And now for A Very Special Valentine's Day Episode of Confidence and Joy. This is a premium subscriber Q&A post about how Emily and her husband "found their way" to each other. You can join up as a premium subscriber ✨ here. ✨
Confidence and Joy is a newsletter by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Subscribe here. You can also follow Emily on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook!
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Q: I'm wanting to look through your past newsletter entries (plus listen to podcast episodes) to find out if you've written something on how your husband found his way to you. (Plus how you both learned about each other and found out how much there was complementary…to spend the rest of your lives together)
A: I use the phrase “found his way” in a couple different ways. The most straightforward way is just… how we met.
We met on OKCupid, back when OKC was just a website, not an app.
I was dating because I had been single for 5 years and liked it pretty well, but I did not want to die alone. Being the nerd I am, I tried a variety of matchmaking websites and found that OKC had the best algorithm. I also read their own research that said that the most successful way for a woman to navigate the site was TURN OFF the setting that allows people to see whether or not you’ve looked at their profile and browse that way. Then, when you see someone whom you would like to talk to, turn that setting back on and go to their profile. They’ll notice you looked… and they’ll write to you.
Emily is a "date-a" nerd, if you'll excuse the pun
See, weird gender dynamics show up in online dating, even if it’s subconscious. Boys chase, girls get chased. Sigh. But basically my therapist dared me to do everything I could to meet excellent new people, and part of “doing everything” included playing this game.
Also, all of this may have changed in the last decade; I haven’t been back on a dating website since I met him, and I hope never to be again. The only thing worse than dating is interviewing for a job.
Anyway, I did that to his profile. He wrote to me because, he says, I had pictures of my dog on my profile and I said somewhere in my profile something like, “Look at this dog! If he likes me, how bad can I be?”
[ If someone extremely cool is also capable of mild self-deprecating humor, seriously consider asking that person out for donuts. Oftentimes, it will turn out that they and their dog are wonderful people. - Spouse in question's editorial note. ]
Once we met, it was pretty simple. There was spark, sure, and he was handsome and very funny and sweet and creative and did not want kids (neither did I), plus he liked me! It also turned out that we had friends in common and could hypothetically have met at a party held by one of them, but we’re both so introverted the odds of both of us choosing to attend the same party were vanishingly small. Which is why we were looking on the internet. It felt obvious.
So that’s the simple story of how he found his way to me and I found my way to him and we found our way to each other. Short answer: we met on the internet. We got married a year later.
Honestly, our timeline was sped up by the cost of rent. I had a dog and a cat and he had two cats, and if we wanted to live together the rent for a place that would accept the six of us was approximately double the cost of a mortgage. So we bought a house. And we got married so that he could be on my health insurance. So romantic, right?
But I also use the phrase “found his way,” “my way,” or “our way,” meaning, “found our way back to each other.”
We’ve been together for something over 10 years, during which time I have written multiple books and been on multiple book tours, while he has kept our household together and cared for our various pets and run his own business. All of this has created windows of time when we felt isolated from each other. When you get into the habit of dealing with shit on your own—which is a habit each of us had during our long experiences of being single, and then we each fell back into it while we were separated by my travel and work schedule—how do you get back to turning to each other for help in times of difficulty? Not only are we two highly competent people, able to function independently, we are also two people who hate to “bother” the other person with our needs. We want to make sure the other person has everything they want and need, including all the time to themselves they need and want. Why risk “imposing” on the other person, when everything is basically fine, you’re just a little lonely all the time?
How do we find our way back to each other?
We make a conscious, deliberate choice. We believe it is worthwhile to stay with each other, to turn toward each other, step closer and closer, knowing there’s always closer to get. Knowing, too, there will be another time when space comes between us, and if we can traverse this space now, it will be all the easier to traverse it next time. If we leave the space between us, it will only become more difficult to cross.
It’s not always easy. In the times when there is distance between us, there are Big Feelings each of us might have about the distance. We might worry that the other person isn’t interested in finding their way back. We might worry that we did too much damage and won’t be able to find our way back.
And yet we turn toward each other. We show each other our worries. We receive each other’s worries with kindness and compassion. We are there for each other.
The result is that our love has deepened and grown, gotten bigger over time, not lesser.
I think the real key is that each admire the other. We respect each other, sure, but the real key is that we look at each other and go, “Wow. Wow! What an amazing person! How lucky am I, that this person chooses to share a household and a life and a purpose to our lives.
One of the wisest things my mother ever told me is, “Some days you wake up and just decide to stay married.” It’s not romantic, in the usual sense of the word, but I think it’s the most romantic thing someone can do for a person they love. Choose each other. Stay, with admiration. Stay with a choice as deliberate and intellectual as it is emotional and instinctive. Love isn’t just emotion, it’s action. It’s finding each other, over and over.
The art for this post is by my dear friend and fellow comics person, Meghan Murphy. Both these images are from shirts Emily and I wore a ton back when we met. Check out her Redbubble, Instagram, and Twitter!
- Marital euphemism AKA @rstevens
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