We took the long way

Annie Dillard made me fall in love

“There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”

—Annie Dillard, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”

I have never been much for dating. For better or worse, my gut instinct has kept my romantic interests static within the confines of my mind over the years. Intuitively, I always knew whether those interests were grounded or not, whether they could survive in the open or not. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the chance of survival was zero. The handfull of times I took risks in revealing my feelings were few and far between, partially because of my own fear, and partially because I knew what I wanted—partnership, wholeheartedness, safety, rest, trust, expansiveness, joy. I saw those ideals lived out in the marriages of people I respected and experienced them myself within the friendships I most valued, but the probability of finding all of that in a romantic partner seemed slim.¹

Some people said my standards for a romantic partner were too high. Some questioned if I wanted marriage at all, but marriage for the sake of marriage simply did not appeal to me. Until I met someone who could convince me that partnership with them was better than singleness, I figured I’d stay single. I lived too many complex and sweet years as a single woman to believe that marriage to the wrong person, for the wrong reasons could ever be right for me. I still believe that. Singleness is too powerful and precious to throw away simply for the sake of the marriage label, so for most of my life marriage seemed like a good gift for other people.

I did ruminate over the generic possibility of falling in love, speculating about the ideal partner in my mind. In my twenties, I spent bursts of energy dabbling unseriously in the online dating realm, swiping left on so many profiles, comparing each man against the others, dismantling profiles and persons until I held a soup of discarded souls, latching onto the shiny bits of specific strangers and wishing I could cobble those elements into someone “perfect.” It is dehumanizing to generalize people in such a way. I now find myself shocked, humbled, and undone by the sweet and generous specificity of falling in love with a particular, imperfect man who is falling in love with imperfect me. Neither of us could imagine how wild and beautiful it would be to love and to be loved so specifically— turns out the ideal doesn’t exist, just human particulars.

In some seasons, I bought into the self-sufficient pride of singleness, subconsciously viewing marriage as a second-tier option in order to ignore my own stifled longings. I saw marriage idolized in ways that undermined the long-suffering, hope, and quiet beauty of a well-lived single life. In healthier seasons, that’s what I most wanted to embody as I accepted the trajectory of long(er) term singleness, and that’s still what I respect most in the many single men and women I admire. I long to follow in their footsteps, learning to live with unmet longings and to wrestle in holding onto hope regardless of circumstance. I resolved that if marriage were in my future, it could only be in the same vein as Denise Levertov’s²:

"Don’t lock me in wedlock: I want 
marriage, an 
encounter--"

It wasn’t until about a year ago, after many intense transitions and seasons of disorientation, that I allowed myself to acknowledge the real desire for partnership in marriage, and to relinquish that absence to God. I was finally honest with myself, moving through grief, and wrestling towards an open-ended peace. I began to understand that though marriage may elude me, Love in its truest sense would not. I sensed the voice of God repeating, “I am with you,” over and over, sensed that I was being invited to live day-by-day into a new kind of contentment that was open to risk, mystery, and peace, and to the expansive possibilities in the unknown. Annie Dillard’s words burned themselves into my mind: “We are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.” I wanted that kind of risk! Enough with playing life safe because of fear!

I read “Reaching Out,” by Henri Nouwen, pushing myself to reach out in ways that were both uncomfortable and healthy for me, to serve with the youth group at church, to meet with a friend regularly for prayer, and randomly in June of 2024 to text the guy I’d always had a lingering question about—just a benign, “congratulations on finishing your PhD” text, even though we hadn’t had contact for nearly five years. Now, looking back on the many seasons and shifts between us in the past 14+ years since we met, all I can see is the wisdom and kindness of God in the timing of our reconnecting and our falling in love.

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Back in college, I had a crush on Taylor from across the way, but honestly every girl did. He was mysterious, attractive, and unattainable because he was so clearly not preoccupied with the idea of dating anyone. We ran in some of the same circles but were only ever acquaintances in that season. A few years after graduating I moved to Boston, coming back to the Nashville area periodically for holidays and weddings. At one of those weddings in the summer of 2016, Taylor and I reconnected in such a way that I began dreaming of him getting into Harvard and completing his PhD in New England, giving us the opportunity to finally get to know one another, maybe even become more than friends?!? That evening was also the first time he really noticed me as we hung out with our friends after the wedding. Soon after, I wrote an insane prayer in my journal—“I don’t know how, but Lord, could it just happen?” Later that year, when I was in town for the holidays and on crutches after a rock-climbing accident, Taylor very sweetly offered to chauffeur me around to see friends at several parties on New Years Eve. Although it was unclear at the time whether it was a date or not, I was crushing HARD.

While Taylor did not end up at Harvard for his PhD, we did begin grabbing coffee with each other about once a year when we were both in Nashville for the holidays, and every single time those little points of contact left me wondering if there was room for something more than friendship between us. In early 2019, we even talked on the phone, him ending the conversation by saying, “I really like talking to you,” and me offering an obscurely open-ended, “feel free to call again.” I wanted him to call again, but nothing happened. We met for our annual coffee during the holidays and then lost contact, moving through separate seasons of school and work as 2020 changed the world, both choosing to live into the communities we were imbedded in in whatever imperfect ways we knew how, offering what little we had.

Since last June when I unknowingly altered the course or our lives with a simple text, I see how this thing is so much bigger than just us. While so many of our friends married each other immediately after college, it simply was not the way forward for us. With each point of contact over the years, we were not ready to risk long distance or to risk walking away from singleness. It was not just about finding the right person, but about the right timing as well. It feels like divine comedy to me that the desperate, crush-inspired prayer of a twenty-five-year-old nearly nine years ago was something God chose to take seriously. “Could it just happen?” I assumed the answer was “no.” Turns out it was just, “not yet.”

Hard as it was to swallow at times, I needed that space. The past nine years have been some of the richest, hardest, and most formative years of my life, and I wouldn’t trade the long way for anything. The most direct route would have cheated both of us out of the maturation we needed. The long way feels incredibly wise, and incredibly kind. I look back now and see how through all those missed connections and tangled longings, I was learning to feed on Christ, to be satisfied in his care, to stand with him on my own two feet.

After nine months of texting, talking, reconnecting, navigating many airports and trips to see one another, spending many tearful evenings spent on the phone anticipating the next visit—we’re getting married. It is surprising and it is wonderful. I did not see this coming, yet I know it is not an arrival, but a shift. The marriage I’m moving toward is not a reward, but it is a gift. Loving and being loved by this specific man has only pushed me to rest more wholly in the expansive love of Christ. This is both something we’re choosing and something that is being chosen for us.

I’m so aware that there is so much I do not know. I’ve worked for the past thirty-four years to become an expert in living as a single person: to be independently myself. Now I’m choosing to try something new—partnership, new forms of love, service, and need, opening myself “to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.”³ And yet in all of it, I am grounded in remembering the truth that is still true whether I’m married or single—“The LORD is the stronghold of my life—”⁴ not Taylor or anyone else, not myself or my circumstances. I need that stability and anchoring. Life is short, and in Lent especially I am acutely aware that death and change could alter my plans at any moment. Yet for the little existence I have, it is my joy to learn to love this man, to encounter this specific speck of dust day by day, to learn to steward what we have, to enter the narrow gate of marriage and walk into the expansive unknown together.

1. Outside of the relationship I now find myself in, friendship remains one of the greatest joys in my life. Both outside and inside the confines of marriage, it seems to be an essential anchor for living into something that will last.

2. From her poem, “About Marriage”

3. From “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction,” by Eugene Peterson

4. Psalm 27:1