About a week into the pandemic lockdown in March, the following question came to my mind: “What if you were supposed to meet a special someone next week in the city you fled?”
A person I follow on YouTube expressed a similar question upon hearing that the lockdown in Los Angeles was going to be extended. She asked: “How am I going to meet (my) someone before I turn 30 if I can’t leave my house???” Yet, yesterday I saw on Instagram that she had gone camping with friends.
Throughout history, people have figured it out.
Despite previous pandemics, wars, and oceans, lovers find lovers.
Soulmates find Soulmates.
One of the questions that I always ask a couple is “How did the two of you meet?” I love to hear these stories. I hear about mutual friends, parties, college classes, and even kindergarten. I hear about sudden flames and slow burns. I hear about ebbs and flows.
John Gottman (psychologist and premiere couples’ researcher) and Helen Fisher (anthropologist and author of Why Him, Why Her?) have each talked about what I call the Science of Attraction. It seems that a love cocktail of hormones plus a quick, but efficient, cognitive decision-making process are involved in selecting a potential mate. Couples have formed for a long time using this system.
In his book Diary of a Player, musician and songwriter Brad Paisley tells one of my favorite stories of all time about how he met his partner, Kimberly Williams-Paisley. I won’t ruin the fun of reading the full story yourself, but essentially, he met her long before he realized that he’d met her. It reminds me of those stories about couples who were in the same place at the same time but never quite met until later.
In my own case, I met my now husband, when I was 17 and he was 21. He was a college roommate of my brother. Our paths crossed on and off for another NINE years before we ran into each other again on graduation day at KU. He adjusted my master’s degree hood. I invited him to my party. And well, the rest is history.
So, in ten years when I ask couples who met in 2020 “How did you two meet?”, I’ll probably hear fewer stories about bars or college and more about a Zoom meeting or a virtual happy hour or virtual party. But believe me, couples will get together.
As the saying goes: where there’s a will, there’s a way.
But feeling hopeful and seeing a way forward is equally important.
Researchers, like the late Dr. Rick Snyder, have studied the positive psychology concept of HOPE and found that it contains something called WAYPOWER. Along with willpower, which is “the extent to which you have the will to shape your future”, waypower is “the extent to which you see a WAY to shape your future.”
So, here’s to all of you celebrating June anniversaries and here’s, especially, to those of you who have had to postpone your June weddings. Love will prevail.