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I guess you could say I was still a kid when I got married. I certainly looked like one. Though I was twenty-four, in most photos from the time I look much younger.

Who would believe that at twenty-four, she was my first-love? My first real love, that is. Naturally I’d had all manner of crushes through the years. The most long-lasting of them being for actress Julia Roberts, but for some reason she thought she was out of my league.

I met my wife in the early spring of 2001, and by mid-summer we were married. Naturally that was a lot for my family to take in, and we faced significant opposition. But all I can say is that it was written for me: that much has become ever more obvious as the years passed by.

A few weeks ago, sitting on our balcony, glancing out across a calm Black Sea towards the Caucasus mountains far off in the distance, my mother expressed similar sentiments. “Who would believe,” she mused, “that my son would meet someone from here, and we’d find ourselves looking at this amazing view?”

My wife and I have often pondered the same. But I doubt anyone has pondered as extensively as I have, given all the things that have come to light through the years. If I didn’t know them to be true, I wouldn’t believe it myself. As it is, I’m genuinely mind blown.

Not only did I still look like a kid when we got married, but you could say my emotional maturity was lagging behind that of my peers. Certainly I remained quite naive, yet to break away as an independent soul, capable of steering my own course in life. I suppose that’s why I trusted so much in our introduction: I considered it an answer to a prayer.

I am very far from the perfect husband. Our life together has been filled with trials and tests, from us, and from outside of us. In the early years I was impetuous and short tempered, and can’t have been easy to get along with. I struggled, too, obtaining meaningful employment, bringing home only a meagre wage. In my own eyes, I remained a failure in every way.

Still, I do believe that all of this was written. As the years pass by we see new things we didn’t see before. As our synapses make new connections within, all that once made no sense slots into place, and we come to new understandings of ourselves and events that once perturbed us.

There were some events in the dim and distant past that were hard to bear. Some of them I completely misunderstood at the time. Others of them were filtered through the understanding of others, and so were mangled beyond all recognition. Some I couldn’t fathom until several decades had passed.

But today I can see that they too were written, as part of the continuum that leads us along the road. For sure, I would not be where I am today without those moments, each experience moulding me into shape. Chain reactions, seen and unseen.

I was a kid when we got married. In some senses, I still am. Even in my mid-forties, I don’t see myself as some big man, making an impression on the world. I’m still making sense of this thing called life. Still struggling along, reconciling myself to all that was written for me. This, not that.