From: prauda@dol-guldur.hut.fi (Kristiina Prauda)
Subject: Re: Where did you meet your S.O.
Organization: Helsinki University, Finland
Date: 07 Jan 93 23:38:12 GMT



Good thread... though my contribution is the most boring there is,
despite my not-just-romantic-but-also-idiotically-dramatic nature:
I met my fiance in Senior High (or what here corresponds to that).
We were classmates. Isn't it just too classical? 

The funny part, though, was that for the first two years, we had
the most terrible war going on all the time - we genuinely disliked 
each other! We had arguments all the time, both during lessons and 
outside them (hew tells me how he enjoyed irritating me as much as 
possible, just to see how angry he could make me - I was an 
interesting scientifical experiment to him... :-)). Then, during
the spring of the second year, we suddenly found mutual hobbies 
- fantasy books (and Elfquest comics) and such stuff... and the 
analysis on how a Certain Person (the guy I had a crush on then) 
was not at all as little interested in me as I thought, and how I 
should just go on with it... Well, I didn't, not really, and then
when the summer came, somehow other people just slowly melted out of
the way. For the whole summer, when Mom teased me, I adamantly stated 
that we were just friends, nothing more, and tried to believe it 
myself as well, but the telephone calls that lasted 4 to 5 hours told 
differently... (4 to 5 hours EVERY EVENING, too!)

We had always talked a lot - that is how the whole thing even began.
And so we found ourselves uttering the dreaded three words even 
before we were "an item" at all. Oh, we had been to movies and the 
like, but here in Finland there is no concept of "dating" - there's 
just being with your friends and going out with them, whether there's 
one friend or many, male or female, and then there is "Being With" 
someone(*), ie. "going steady". No recognition of the tentative state, 
though it certainly is there... 

((*) NO, it doesn't mean sex, so keep your dirty imaginations to 
yourselves. :-) I *know* what it looks like, but it doesn't.) 

So, one August night on the telephone, two eighteen-year-olds who
had never "Been With" anyone before, went straight from the state 
of "just friends" to Love, by saying those Fateful Words. I do not
know if we truly understood what they meant, but we went on learning.

And kept on... until, five and a half years later, here we are, still
learning, still growing. We are very different in some aspects, and 
there is no changing of a person's basic nature, but since we both have 
grown up and become if not adult then at least adult-ish mostly during 
these years together, we have been able to mold that growing towards 
each other. There have been problems - sometimes big ones - as can be
expected with two people in the middle of independent-life identity
crisis, and in a LRD, too (we now study 150 miles apart)... but there 
has never been a question of the love we share, even though there has 
sometimes been question of whether any love could get past those 
problems. We have even broken up once, but there was no way to keep
it that way. 

Besides all the other factors (like seeing how exactly the other
person is the thing that we need), there is a strange sense of 
necessity, of belonging, between us. There is very little choice: 
a world without the other one cannot be. It would be impossible. We 
are of the same substance, like (to borrow my own comparison) the two 
sides of a coin. Facing in different directions, but altogether 
unseparable... 

I wonder if we got mixed up in a story at some stage? :-)


I love him. I love you, Mikko (I know you'll be reading this, sooner 
or later). And no matter how much growing up it will still take, I 
will learn to live that love and what it really means - for the rest 
of our life. 

For ever.  



Kristiina 
Official FireDancer of the RFA
prauda@dol-guldur.hut.fi

Newsgroups: alt.romance.chat