My cousin is getting married next month to someone our family just freakin' adores. AK is a mess, but she's fun and hilarious and has done wonders my cousin A's confidence. His ex put him through the ringer after they broke up, so it's been awesome to see him move on and find the kind of happiness he has now. The two of them are crazy about each other and neither can believe they get to marry the other one. I had a convo with a friend last night about the impending nuptials and she made a comment about how nice it must be "to have someone choose you". I've been sitting with that thought for awhile now and she's right, it is nice when that happens. It happened to me once, but I was too young to appreciate it. The first love and I were back and forth and on and off many, many times. Youth and inexperience kept both of us from truly appreciating what we had. But in college, she was the first to fully grasp how special we could be together and when we got back together for what would turn out to be the last time, we had a long talk about our past mistakes. I asked her what made it this go round any different from all the other ones, why I should trust that we weren't going to fail again, and she said I should trust it because she'd learned from all the past ish and she was choosing me and would continue to choose me for the rest of her life. And she did. And though our time together was cut very short, I never did doubt she was serious about her commitment of putting us before all else. I don't think I really understood how rare that is, or how lucky I was to have experienced it, until this conversation yesterday.
To know someone would absolutely choose you over all else, and not think twice about it, is a beautiful thing. It's also rare in that not everyone gets to experience that, and not everyone is genuine when they say they would choose you over all else. The way the cousin and AK feel about each other has evolved over the last few years. They were introduced by a mutual friend and it was kind of a slow burn because AK thought A wanted to fast track marriage and kids (he didn't) and A thought AK may not have been too keen on adulthood (I mean, who is, really? But while she talks a good game about being immature, she actually has her crap together...well, kinda). Then, they had an ugly-ish break-up in 2014 that resulted in them not even speaking for a few months (AK says the catalyst to end the silence was hearing Toni Braxton's "Another Sad Love Song" multiple times within a one week span). Even when they got back together it was touch and go because A had dated someone else during the time apart and it didn't sit well with AK. But they found a rhythm last year and you could tell they were low-key crazy about one another. Late last year, a number of our friends walked down the aisle (traitors!) and it sparked a convo between them about marriage and the future and all that and, somehow in the chaos, A decided to propose. They ditched being low-key crazy and became all out crazy about each other, not caring who knew it. It's sweet, actually. I look forward to the wedding and I hope someday I get to experience the same thing (sans wedding, of course) of someone choosing me and me choosing them and all feeling right with the world. That'd be nifty.
