Invisible String
Taylor Swift's Invisible String is on her Folklore album. It is about the invisible string theory. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's the idea that basically, from the moment you are born, there is an imaginary string tying you to your soulmate. You know what it's like, it's kind of like the romantic equivalent of the Six Degrees of Separation Theory. Which is something that, as a person, I accidentally abuse. I was once described by a friend as someone who knows everybody on a “I know a guy through a guy” basis. Paige and my love story is yet another prime example of this. Before we get into this, I wanted to say that most of this information can be found in other places in my writings, but I wanted to put everything together in one space, and as Paige and I were having our first dance, a thought occurred to me that I thought would make this installment complete. So what I'm going to do is go through the things that connected Paige and me before we started dating, in timeline order.
1. Mom and Mrs. O'Brien (I should probably stop calling her Mrs. O'Brien; she's my mother-in-law) were in the same interior design classes together at OSU, and we recently found out they actually lived in the same dorm building at the same time.
2. While I didn't meet Noah until 2019, Noah went to grade (and I believe middle) school with one set of Paige’s cousins.
3. When I was probably 3, I met a family friend of the Andersons, the McCanns (their son, Henry, is included in the epilogue of Once In A Lifetime: A Song for Sam). It turns out that the McCanns are actually cousins of one of Page's cousins.
4. Speaking of Anderson's, Rich Anderson worked out at the gym with Paige's grandma and one of her uncles for years.
5. I also went to school with one set of Paige's cousins, and the youngest one in that family was in one of my first classes as a teacher.
6. Obviously, my brother Ryan and Paige's brother Ryan went to high school together and played on the same soccer team (that's actually how we met), but the Ryans (and our parents) met (or, in the case of our moms, we were reintroduced) when both boys started playing basketball against each other in 4th grade.
7. One of Paige's little brothers’ best friends lived four houses up for me for most of my teenage years.
8. Okay, fine, this one is kind of cheating- Paige went to high school with a lot of people I knew from OLP. We lived less than 3 miles away from each other, and we both went to Catholic schools, it was kind of inevitable.
9. This one is also sort of cheating, for the same reason- Mrs. O'Brien and S.M.’s mom knew each other pretty well, because they had lunch duty together a lot at St. Charles. Again, a big Catholic school, but still, the fact that those two specifically knew each other is very big. At the wedding, Nikki McCarthy asked Mrs. O’Brien, “How do you know the Ulibarris?” Mrs. O’Brien replied, “I’m Paige’s mom!”
10. As I've mentioned before, I do a ton of speaking at OSU in a class for incoming teachers through my public speaking mentor, Dr. Brooks. At some point during the pandemic, I did a Zoom class for Dr. Brooks and Paige's best friend, Nicole was in the class.
Paige and I have only been together for 3 years, and we have a lifetime ahead of us. I'm sure there are other tiny little connections that I either couldn't think of when I was writing this, or we don't know about yet, and we'll find out eventually. But I’m honestly not bringing up these little connections because I think they are the foundation of our relationship. I think they show that we would have found each other eventually, and the invisible string Theory is very cute. But the main reason I’m bringing it up is all the people who connect us, and even those that don’t had profound impacts on Paige and I individually.
I listened to the lyrics as Paige and I had our first dance. As I looked into her eyes, I thought about every moment that had led me here. Every friendship, every fight, every friendship that ended, every death, every failure, every success… I mean, even the pandemic. Everything that happened before Cousin Simple played Newport in March of 2023 made Paige and me the people we needed to be to start dating. And everything that happened after, well, that led us to this moment. Paige is now my wife. To everyone who made us what we are, thank you!
Mr. & Mrs. Ulibarri, SBT
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