How a Summer Fling in High School Turned Into Years of Marriage

We met in high school, in Kansas City, Missouri. I lived in Atlanta, Georgia, but my family/parents were from Kansas City and I would visit often. My husband, Theo, went to school with my cousin. So, one summer when I came to visit, my cousin was dating someone, and I was third-wheeling it, so they got the bright idea to hook me up with his friend, which was Theo. He came over to my cousin’s house so we could all hang out. We hit it off and we spent as much time together as we could while I was there. But, of course, I had to go back home sooner than later.

My parents were super strict, so keeping in touch was a challenge outside of times when I was in town. At most, my cousin would call me and pretend that we were talking, then she would put the phone down and let me talk to Theo. We tried to keep up a long-distance “relationship,” but that wasn’t realistic with so much distance between us as kids. Eventually, I found out that he had gotten a girlfriend, and things fizzled out.

Fast forward, Theo (and his girlfriend) moved to Atlanta for college. He was attending Clark Atlanta, and I was attending Kennesaw State. After a while, I had built a brief “friendship” with his girlfriend and thought Theo and I were well over with. They had been together for years by this point. Fast forward again, they had broken up, I hadn’t spoken to either of them in quite some time, and he turned up with a new girlfriend.

Theo and I had mutual friends in our networks and I was getting whispers of what he had going on. Then we ended up reconnecting on social media, but still kept it very casual. I always wondered about Theo, but I also felt like he played me in high school. However, it was high school. As years passed, I forgave him for what happened and we decided to move forward as friends. Until he broke up with his girlfriend, and I got a random call – “we never got to see about us.” We started hanging out again and have not separated since.

Now, we’re going to be celebrating five years of marriage in June. Marriage has been healing to us both in so many ways. Our relationship works best because we’re friends first. Additionally, we were always looking for what could potentially be our weaknesses as a couple. It was not us looking for problems in the relationship; we’ve just always been heavily invested in healing from generational trauma that we have both seen affect our families. Black love is important to us because we value the bloodline of our ancestors and feel great pride in protecting that.