The adventures of getting to know the man I already married
This week marks six months since I met my husband.
That sentence is still objectively ridiculous.
Six months ago, Adan was a man I had never met. Forty-six days later, I married him. And now, six months into knowing each other, we're still discovering some of the things most couples probably figure out somewhere between the second date and deciding whose apartment they're going to sleep at.
Favorite foods, weird habits, family traditions, what makes the other person irrationally angry, how they take their coffee, and what happens to them emotionally when a group of grown men begins chasing a ball around a field.
We didn't get to all of that before the wedding. We were busy.
So now we're doing some of the dating afterward, which is how my Colombian husband and I occasionally find ourselves sitting inches apart, communicating through translation software, while trying to figure out which football the other person is talking about.
Mine is football. His is fútbol. And we're both completely convinced ours deserves the name.
Apparently He Watches Football Now
I am a lifelong Chicago Bears fan, and not casually.
Football season changes the entire television situation in my house. I get YouTube TV and Sunday Ticket. We watch Thursday Night Football, the Bears regardless of which Sunday window they play in, and naturally, the other Sunday games too. Then there's Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football.
This is not background noise in our house. We are committed.
Football has also been part of a tradition with my son for years, so when Adan entered my life, he wasn't entering a household where I occasionally happened to notice that the Bears were playing. He entered football season, with all the enthusiasm, television subscriptions, and emotional investment that entails.
At first, I assumed he would tolerate it.
Adan is Colombian. His football involves a round ball, very little use of anyone's hands, and a level of emotional devastation I'm still trying to understand. He grew up loving fútbol, while I grew up in Chicago loving the Bears. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable cultural difference, and I didn't expect either of us to suddenly become obsessed with the other's sport.
Except somewhere along the way, he started watching. And then he started learning.
When I went to Chicago for a Bears game, Adan watched from Arizona, in Spanish, and afterward was genuinely excited to tell me how much more he understood about American football. I thought it was adorable. My husband was making an effort to understand something I loved, and that felt pretty special.
I assumed that was probably the extent of it. Supportive husband learns enough about wife's favorite sport to participate. Very sweet.
Except last Sunday, he texted me.
"Can you tell me who won the first football games today?"
I was confused. What football games? What was he talking about?
Then came the clarification: Fútbol americano.
Oh. He meant the early NFL games. Not the Bears. The other games.
This man had somehow progressed from I will watch the Bears because my wife loves them to I would like an update on the early Sunday slate.
Sir. How did we get here?
I looked at the screenshot he'd sent me and realized he'd already been Googling NFL scores in Spanish. He wasn't just politely watching a game because I happened to have it on television. He was independently checking football scores, in his own language, because apparently he had developed an actual interest.
This was no longer casual spousal support.
Apparently my husband follows football now.
To Be Fair, I Have an América Problem
Of course, I can't make too much fun of him because something very similar has been happening in the opposite direction.
Adan loves América de Cali. And when I say loves, what I mean is that watching América de Cali has introduced me to emotional ranges I previously didn't know were available to an adult human being.
He is dramatic. So dramatic.
A bad play isn't simply a bad play. It's a betrayal. A questionable decision is an offense against the natural order. A loss can apparently require an entire emotional recovery period.
Sometimes it's hilarious. Sometimes, particularly when I'm sitting beside him, it's a little less hilarious.
And yet, somehow, I'm starting to care too.
I know América de Cali now. I recognize the colors, I pay attention to whether they're playing, and I understand enough to know when things are going well. Perhaps more importantly, I've learned to assess the emotional climate before asking unnecessary questions during a match.
Somewhere along the way, the América de Cali jerseys in my closet also started to outnumber my Bears shirts, which feels like a development I probably should have noticed sooner.
I certainly didn't wake up one morning and decide that Colombian fútbol was something missing from my life. I became interested because he was interested, and because I genuinely love watching him care about things, even when he's being completely ridiculous about them.
I think that's one of the things I'm beginning to understand about us. We're not necessarily falling in love with all the same things. We're falling in love with the things that make each other happy.
And sometimes, almost without noticing, those things become important to us too.
I Wasn't Waiting to Be Rescued
Before I met Adan, I was looking for a relationship. Obviously. I was on a dating app, not conducting sociological research.
But I also wasn't sitting around believing some man was going to appear and suddenly begin my life for me.
I already had a life. I had children I adored, work that mattered to me, friends, traditions, travel, plans, football Sundays, a home, responsibilities, and things I wanted to build. For a long time, I'd more or less decided that my children were the great loves of my life, and I was okay with that.
I still wanted to date. I'm not dead.
But I genuinely didn't expect to meet someone like Adan.
One of the things that continues to surprise me about loving him is how completely he's entered my life without somehow requiring me to leave it. I don't feel like I'm bending myself into the shape of his world, and he isn't bending himself into mine. Instead, we keep finding ways to walk into each other's worlds.
I went to Colombia and fell in love with his family. I learned about the places that shaped him and started calling him Fabricio because that was the name I heard his family use. I've learned about his traditions, the music he loves, and apparently developed opinions about América de Cali.
Meanwhile, this Colombian fútbol fanatic is sitting in Arizona asking me who won the early NFL games.
There's something really beautiful about that to me.
Because we're not becoming less ourselves in order to be together. I think we're becoming more ourselves.
Adan gives me room to be exactly who I am. I don't have to become quieter, easier, less independent, or less invested in the things I already loved before he arrived. And I want the same thing for him. I want to know the man who existed before I met him, the things he cared about, the traditions he grew up with, and the passions that have absolutely nothing to do with me.
We don't seem particularly interested in changing each other. We get curious instead.
Sometimes that curiosity looks romantic and profound, like traveling thousands of miles to meet your husband's family without him. Other times, it's considerably less complicated.
Wait. Which football are we talking about?
The Man Is Dramatic
There is, however, another important element to all of this.
Adan is extraordinarily dramatic, and I mean that with tremendous affection.
Mostly.
The man possesses feelings at full volume. This is extremely apparent during fútbol, but it's also occasionally apparent during marriage.
Here's the inconvenient part, though. He's dramatic about me too.
And I love it.
The same intensity that makes me glance over during an América de Cali match and think, Surely this situation does not require this level of emotional response, is also part of the man who loves me so loudly.
There's very little ambiguity with Adan. He loves enormously, worries deeply, celebrates exuberantly, and gets ridiculously excited about things. He experiences fútbol losses as personal betrayals, and apparently he now has feelings about the NFL's early Sunday results too.
Sometimes his intensity makes me crazy. Other times it makes me laugh until I can't breathe. And sometimes I look at the way this man loves me and realize I wouldn't actually want him turned down very much at all.
Maybe that's another thing I'm learning six months into marriage. You don't get to order another person à la carte.
I'd happily take the passionate devotion, but could we perhaps remove approximately thirty percent of the América de Cali emotional volatility?
Apparently not.
Fair enough.
Six Months
Six months is nothing, really.
That's one of the strangest things about our relationship. We're married. We've made enormous decisions together, met families, combined lives, and talked about houses, countries, and futures. In so many ways, it feels like we've known each other forever.
And yet, six months.
There's still so much I don't know about him, and so much he's continuing to discover about me.
Normally, I suppose, people learn much of this while they're dating and then decide whether they want to build a life together. We decided to build the life first, and now we keep opening doors inside it and discovering what else is there.
And weirdly, I love that.
I love that I'm still meeting my husband. I love discovering the boy who loved fútbol before I existed in his world, and I love watching him discover pieces of me that existed long before he arrived. Something as silly as football has become another little doorway into understanding each other, and I find that unexpectedly wonderful.
Maybe that's why I've wanted to write about him so much.
I've wanted to write for most of my life, but I'd never met someone who made me want to pay attention quite like this. Adan gives me material. Endless, dramatic, occasionally infuriating, extremely funny material.
But he also makes me want to notice things. The conversations, the mistranslations, the games, the ordinary Sundays, and the ridiculous things we say while sitting beside each other on the couch. I want to remember how it felt to learn these little pieces of him, because they're part of falling in love too.
Not just Colombia, or weddings, or airports, or enormous life decisions. Those stories matter, of course, and I'm so grateful we've had them.
But there's something pretty special about the ordinary moments that make up a life together.
Six months after meeting him, I'm sitting beside the man I already married, still discovering who he is, and still finding new reasons to fall in love with him.
Apparently, he watches football now.
And apparently, I care about fútbol.
I think we're both in trouble.
Bear Down.
And, fine.
Vamos América.
♥️
