No druggies!! Married to the ex-pothead.

No heavy drinkers!! Yeah, well, he did that too.

And….I'm a stepmom (as you already know that story, J.).

10 years we've known each other this June. 7 years of long distance on again off again love, 6 hour phone calls until 5am, $600USD phone bills (good thing my mother-in-law reeeeaaaaaly likes me!), one move to Detroit, and one small child. And through it all, it was the endless conversations about everything and anything that triumphed over all the above. I don't have to be anything or anyone I'm not. Not that we didn't have disagreements about certain things, but he knows what I'm willing to change and what just is and accepts that, and the things that he does push on are the things that I know I need to be pushed on too. It's not the person you can live with, it's the one you can't live without. i.e. who did he call the morning of Sept 11, 2001? ME! Your path to love will (hopefully for your sake) be different than mine, but I hope the elements of hope, positive change, respect, laughter and being able to be "in your own skin" will be there for you too.

It wasn't that simple from the beginning. We went through many years and some big and small bumps to finally realize what was important to us.

But I guess the one for you is just the one you never want to break up AND you never DO break up with. :)

As for how I knew my wife and boyfriend were for me? I just did. I felt cared about, safe, accepted, attractive and wanted. And I didn't have to wear a mask or pretend to be something I wasn't. They just like me for who I am.

Are you friends with any men? If not, try to cultivate some.

Is inspector climate the man I thought I'd spend the rest of my life with? No, but do I think so now – yeah. The reason he makes me feel safe and so comfortable. I get to be the best version of me when I am with him…

And also, he was the first guy I'd ever shared a bed with and actually slept. Whenever I'd slept over with other boyfriends I'd tossed and turned all night and slept incredibly poorly. With him, the first time we spent the night I fell asleep right away and woke up the next morning totally refreshed.

That books perspective sounds interesting. I hope you do a review. Another issue about people in their 30's is that we get more stuck in our ways and is harder on people who fall short of our expectations. Someone told me this last year and he was so right.

When Troy and I met he had just broken up with the woman he was engaged to, and I had broken up with my high-school sweetheart. I was NOT interested in dating, and even if I had been, Troy was the LAST person I would have thought of dating. He was a really nice guy, but not someone I would have imagined myself dating at all. We were friends and co-workers for a few months, then good friends for a couple of months, and then people started asking me if we were dating, which I laughed off. Troy and I had actually talked about how great it was to just be good friends and not worry about all that dating crap, so we thought the questions about dating each other were hilarious.

Then one day I thought, "You know, Troy is such a good guy and we get along so well, maybe we *should* try dating. Maybe we'll miss out on something really great if we don't at least try." I took a deep breath and talked to him about it, and he agreed with me that it would be worth a shot. So we switched our paradigm from friendship to dating. (Yes, we really are nerds, and we really did talk about it that way!)

In the end, it was a much easier switch than I ever imagined it would be. We knew within a couple of weeks that we would get married, which was amazing to us even at the time. And although in the beginning it was just friendship and respect and a rational decision to build on that, once we opened ourselves to the possibility there were definitely sparks. Lots of them. :-)

So I guess the moral of this story is, be open to possibilities that don't seem like your ideal relationship because you never know how it'll turn out in the end. Or something like that.