love’s unlikely teacher
Relationships are hard, and hard relationships teach you the most. Like Hozier’s Cherry Wine, or No Me Queda Mas by Selena you learn your limits, strength, and how to love again, but can you learn just as much about yourself from a romantic partner as an unromantic one?
Today I sipped on tea, reminiscing on what love has come to be, realizing I learned most about it through a very unlikely teacher, my roommate: a fair-skinned, 5’4 Mexican girl, with a slight Hispanic accent she swears isn’t there, that occasionally dies her long brown hair red, and is the reason I can speak broken Spanish today.
We began our friendship three years ago, without thinking that it would last. Now we cook meals together, have mastered each other’s coffee preference (hers always with more vanilla creamer clouding the once dark brown Columbian Coffee), and mess up our sleep schedules staying up until 3 am, entranced in deep conversations until our burning eyelids beg us to sleep. It was during one of these talks we sat on the cream carpeted floor of our shared bedroom, where we confessed mutual hesitation in the longevity of our friendship at our initial encounter.
Like a series of unfortunate events that turned fortunate, I first met her on a cold Monday morning before class while I sipped my chai trying to stay warm when a figure approached hurried, and sat down. She was hiding from an annoying guy, and like fate, or desperation she chose me to serve as her company. In between my sips she explained how her high school drama followed her to college, and I sat confused thinking, “There is no way I’m going to talk to her again.” Drama on the first day of university was not a registered class I signed up for, but three years later we laugh about our first encounter every chance we get. “I thought you were weird too,” she laughed, “you talked funny, with big words.” She was very traditional and Mexican, I nothing of the sort. We were on opposite sides of the personality spectrum, and if Myers Brigs saw us he would never pair us. Anyone start a relationship like this?
Now we joke I am the forgetful, happy, temperate, and always rational husband, she the emotional, reserved, very homey wife who dances to corridos, banda, and nortenas and for a non-latinx those guitar notes are the closest thing to magic I’ve ever heard, second to her compassion. For three years we kept each other in check, like a well-oiled machine and learned more about the other and ourselves talking on that bedroom floor, first with hesitation, then with complete freedom.
She taught me love is considerate and understanding without limits. It listens to the same problem and story like it is the first time because you like to see them happy telling it again, and offers the same advice to the same problem for the 10th time that week without frustration. Love probably gets annoyed with you for over working yourself but never stays upset because they understand that is just who you are. More than anything love is compassion, and always being there for the person you choose. You become a better person because of it, and learn about yourself in more ways than you could imagine. We were each other’s complimentary colors that switched like clockwork depending on the other- cool blue or fiery orange- and joke our significant other will have to accept us as a package deal.
And now, at breakfast, as I listen to her humming to Culpable Tu while cooking chilaquiles I realize love is a finicky thing that the worst claim they’ve mastered, and the best say they are learning about it every day.