Fuck Destiny. Try Work.

Occasionally, someone asks me, “Do you feel that Gini’s your soul mate? You’ve been dizzyingly, rapturously in love for fifteen years – and isn’t that destiny?”
Fuck no it isn’t.
Now, Gini and I liked each other a lot, which was the key to why we managed to somehow forge a connection over the Internets. We had a similar, if evil, sense of humor. We shared the same concept of fairness. We both liked fucking a whole lot.
But when we got together, man did we have a lot to work on.
Yeah, we live in an idyllic wonderland these days – but don’t ever forget we built this fucking thing, brick by brick. If you’d seen us a year after our marriage, you would have thought we were headed for divorce. Hell, at one point Gini flat-out told me she didn’t love me any more, and we spent six months figuring out what to do when that happened.
We fought until dawn sometimes, screaming as we slowly tried to determine how to be kind to each other without sacrificing the things that let us function.
And slowly, we learned each other’s secret language of love. She learned I needed warm, Sunday morning snuggles; I learned she needed clean kitchens. We picked up on the signals that told us when we felt justified but were acting like utter choads. We learned how to apologize without clogging up the joint with denials, defenses, and backpeddling.
After about three years, it got good.
After about six, it got fantastic, and has yet to stop improving.
At fifteen, it’s bliss. It’s our refuge. It’s probably the best thing we’ve achieved together.
But if you tell me that “destiny” brought us together, you’re telling me that destiny did the work. Fuck that fickle bitch. Destiny maybe put us in the same chat room together – or maybe that was her slacker brother Chance – and so I’ll be eternally grateful to someone out there. But when I was seething with neurotic jealousy and Gini was squashing her feelings so deep down even she didn’t know how furious she was, where the hell was destiny?
No. We did this. And I shudder to think of what would have happened if I’d waited for cloud-castles to float by bearing my soul-mate on a sweet tide of incense and pheromones.
Fuck that. My castle started with two people, two shovels, and a quarry that would have broken a sane man’s back. Look at our hands: they’re full of callouses, our fingernails crusted with dirt and blood, and some days the west wing collapses and we walk out with these tools we built ourselves to prop the fucking thing up again.
This is no dream. This is hard work.
And it is glorious.