Six years ago today Olof and I first chatted online. I blush a little in memory of some of the things I said that first time, and if I’d known where it all would lead I’d have been a bit more circumspect, I hope. Although, perhaps those things were part of the reason that it did lead where it did, who knows. It’s not impossible that those few lines of outrageous and outrageously bad Swedish were what made me, as he put it then, “not an easy girl to forget” (I’ve chosen to ignore that that observation is not necessarily a compliment).

After the first couple of days that we “talked,” lo these many years ago, I sent a copy of our chat history to one of my close friends with a note reading, “This guy is *so* my type.” I was hooked from the get-go. Even with all those thousands of miles between us, I knew there was something fundamentally right about this connection.

In any case, here we are, what seems both a very short and a very long time later, and sappy as it sounds, it just keeps getting better. It might surprise you, then, to know that Lydia has said now and again that she wishes we would get divorced. The first time she said it I was quite taken aback, though I remained outwardly calm, and tried to engage her in a serious discussion about why she would say such a thing. Had Olof said or done something that made her want us to leave him? To my immense relief–I would always take my child’s side over my husband’s, but I so did not want to add another failed marriage notch on my belt–it turned out to be only that she thought it would be fun to live one week with mom, and one with dad. You know, two houses, two bedrooms, twice the toys, twice the fun, not to mention that on those (increasingly frequent) occasions when it’s “no fun being [my] kid,” she would have another home all set up to run away to. I promptly burst her bubble and assured her that we weren’t going to be getting divorced.

“You can’t say for sure,” she answered. “You don’t know what will happen in the future.”

I had to admit that she was correct, of course, that I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I also realized then that I can say for sure that we won’t be getting divorced. I’ve been married before, remember. I know doomed marriages, intimately, and this is not one. I can’t explain how or why I’m so sure that we’re on the right track, but there’s not a fiber of doubt in my being that both of us are in this for the long haul. Sure, we have our differences and our disagreements, but I can’t imagine anything that would make either of us decide we were better off without the other. Just the idea strikes me as a little asburd.

So, as much as it may inconvenience her, I guess poor Lydia is going to have to endure growing up with committed, happily married parents. I’m sure her therapy bills will be legendary.