A slow burn,
seasoned generously.
It began with a side-eye and ended in a wedding invitation. The chapters in between are the good part.
The night we met, we sat directly across from each other and barely spoke. Valeria didn't really notice Roberto. He, for his part, noticed her and thought she was a bit "stuck-up." In summary: we would both like to formally apologize to our past selves for having such bad taste in each other.
Months later, Roberto and a friend were driving to the coast and — in a lapse of judgment that turned out to be the best decision of his life — invited Valeria along. He was surprisingly funny. She was surprisingly hard to dislike. By the drive home, both of us had privately torn up our first impressions, frantically rewritten them, and then kept it to ourselves for weeks, both too stubborn to say it first.
We went down to El Tunco on a Tuesday, then again that Friday, and somewhere in there came the barbecue and the backgammon. One game became five — because the loser always demands a rematch and the winner is morally incapable of stopping. We still play often, we still keep score, and we still take each loss as a profound personal injustice. It turns out the secret to a happy relationship is two people equally unwilling to be the bigger person.
Then came the daily tennis, the weekly rematches, pasta one night and tacos the next, and the evenings we solemnly swore we'd eat healthy and produced "healthy" chicken tenders — a dish that has improved zero health outcomes and salvaged countless relationships. They have ended arguments mid-sentence. They have rescued bad days. If a marriage can be built on a foundation, ours is breaded. We're at peace with this.
Now half of every family trip is secretly engineered around the nearest golf course. Roberto has played for years; Valeria, in her own honest words, isn't bad — and is still, very enthusiastically, trying. She has a genuinely lovely swing and a long-running disagreement with the hole about where it ought to be located. Roberto has perfected saying "great contact!" with the steady, loving conviction of a man who saw exactly where that ball went and has chosen peace.
Mika is Valeria's dog, so loyalty to Valeria was the assumption. Then Roberto came along, and she fell just as hard for him — some days harder. When the dog loves you that much, you stop questioning it and start planning a wedding.
More backgammon, more tenders, more golf of deeply questionable quality, more laughing at jokes that genuinely only land for the two of us. From a night where we completely failed to click, to a life neither of us would trade for anything on earth — the rest, as they say, is history. Now we just need you in the room for the next part.
