Ifs

I love hearing about how people meet. It fascinates me every time I hear a new story and reminds me of how fantastically random people's encounters with one another can be. A girl can sit at home after a shitty day at work and wonder whether or not she should go to her co-worker's birthday party. She hears the siren songs of her PJs and bucket of chocolate ice cream, and is just about to head to bed, when for some reason, she thinks to herself, "Why not?" And so she goes. And there, she meets a somewhat cute guy, a friend of a friend, whom, three years later, she marries. And perhaps that very guy, the week before, happened to take a later train than usual and happened to bump into an old college buddy who happened to invite him to this party.

So if he had taken a later train, or if she decided to stay in, they never would have met. Yet for some odd reason, an entire sequence of disconnected events through people and objects and time and chemicals in that person's brain amidst the circumstances led the guy and the gal to meet.

It fascinates me. And I think this fascination is the basis for about a million movies. People may attribute certain events to fate. Yet, while I appreciate how eerily well-timed events can lead to something wonderful, I won't relegate love to fate. It seems that the randomness of it all is even more supernatural and magical than fate.

I realized all of this as I perused the wedding section of the New York Times. I've scanned that page a few times to see if I'll recognize a name or two, and sometimes a particularly unique surname will compel me to click onto their story and how they met. An elevator. A get together. A work event. A friend of a friend. Totally random.

People (including me) look and look and look. And sometimes, people do meet and marry people they met after making their efforts, for example, match.com, a church social, and speed-dating (all of which I know for a fact have led to many marriages). Yet even in those settings, I believe the laws of randomness still apply.

It turns out that the shy guy (whom I'm still dating) and I were on the same exact online dating website. As some people may recall, I did a brief stint with online dating December 2005-January 2006. Yet his account was deactivated at the time I was on, and active before and after my stint. So apparently, we 'missed' each other. And for some reason, almost two years later, we happened to meet at a bar.

Random. Isn't it?