(co-written by Team Rankin to commemorate 22!)

Not everyone believes in the power of the universe. Hell, even Bruce has only recently started acknowledging the fact that many parts of how our relationship began were more than mere coincidences. Recently, he mentioned the idea that our lives started in two separate places, seemingly worlds apart, but once the wheels went into motion they started hurtling towards each other on a collision course to our destiny. Imagine two lines headed straight towards one another, when suddenly they get so close that they almost touch. They then begin to run parallel, with the distance between the lines varying depending upon where we were in our journey together. Sometimes the lines would touch for brief periods of time, practically bouncing off one another, but then moving away from each other until the time came for them to come together to form one single line. After four years of those lines running alongside each other, a single line finally formed 22 years ago this week, on December 15, 1994.

That brings us to this number of 22. It’s quite symbolic for us this year, in more ways than one. First and foremost, it is the number of years that we have been partners in this relationship of ours. It also happens to be how old we both were when we took our friendship of four years to the next level. Even those with the poorest of math skills (like Rennie! Hence, Spanish teacher….not math teacher!), can see that 22 plus 22 equals 44. This means that we have been together for half of our lives. Think about that! We have been together almost longer than each of us was alive when those two parallel lines became one.

Here we are at age 22.

It might seem simple to many, but thinking about how many factors were at play for us to even have met each other is mind-blowing. Interestingly enough, we grew up just a few towns away from each other, and certainly our paths could have crossed about a million times long before they did. While Bruce lived almost his entire life in the same house, in the same town, Rennie moved from New Hampshire to NJ at age eleven (Hmmmm. Again, Rennie is no math teacher, but she is pretty sure 11 is half of 22!). We hung out at the same malls, went to the same movie theaters, used some of the same doctors, and played miniature golf at the same place. No doubt a young Bruce and young Rennie could have been occupying the same space at some point before we entered college.

Speaking of college, the coincidences become even more obvious when we examine how it is that we both ended up attending Rutgers University. Rutgers was neither of our first choices, but for some unexplained reason we both decided to go there once we visited the campus. There was just something about the place that drew us both there, despite the fact that the visits were really just a formality of the college hunting process. After all, it was the “State University of New Jersey” and “the ‘Princeton’ of all the state schools”, so why not check it out? Once we had each decided to go there, there was the matter of which of the campuses we would choose to live on (Just a reminder…we hadn’t even met yet.) We both were accepted to the College  Avenue campus so the easy answer was to live there, as it was the oldest, most active of the campuses in New Brunswick. But again, fate stepped in, as we both wanted to bring our cars (spoiled rotten, both of us!)…something that could only be done on the spacious (yet sleepy) Livingston campus. Most given the choice would not have lived there in those days, but we both viewed it as our best option because it allowed us the freedom to jump in our own cars and go wherever and whenever we wanted. Not that we did. At least once we met.

Now, how exactly did we meet? While Bruce first saw and had his eye on Rennie during the summer orientation months before our freshman year began, it took more coincidence for us to actually cross paths and meet for the first time. What we came to find out is that the friends that Rennie had made (and kept) during that summer orientation were friends with some of Bruce’s dorm-mates. One night, early in the first semester of our freshman year, one of those friends invited Rennie to go to a “party” in Bruce’s dorm with her. As fate would have it, Bruce ended up at the same party, and we were introduced for the first time. We quickly hit it off, and began to realize almost immediately how much we had in common. We talked about some of the same places in North Jersey we had both frequented and we also discovered that our comedic sensibilities were very much alike. Once we discovered this Venn Diagram (old teacher habits die hard!) of our friends, we began hanging out together more and more. (Side note about the party: We all played Trivial Pursuit. The teams were Bruce against everyone else in the room. Bruce won.)

The friendship really began to take off when Rennie moved into Bruce’s dorm with some of her friends (who were friends with some of Bruce’s friends) sophomore year. We were now living in the same space, spending countless hours hanging out, and eating our meals together. What started to become apparent to both of us was that Bruce had it bad for Rennie. REALLY BAD. But Rennie didn’t feel the same way, and Bruce found himself trapped in the “friend zone” while she dated other people. This friction didn’t affect the strength of our friendship at all though, in fact it likely made it stronger. We began to see each other even on breaks from school when the dorms were closed. We would see movies, go for ice cream or dinner, and just spend time together catching up. We were beginning to connect on a very deep level, even if we didn’t really know it yet.

Those two lines we wrote about before started moving farther away from each other than they’d been since we met, but only for geographical reasons…as Rennie decided to spend her junior year abroad in Spain. In the age before the Internet, this was not so easy of an obstacle to overcome. Our only contact for the year was through old-fashioned handwritten letters, as phone calls were completely out of the question since long distance calling was brutally expensive…especially for poor, struggling college students. While Rennie was off on a fabulous adventure abroad, Bruce was doing the typical college things: drinking, sleeping, sometimes going to class, and drinking. Recently we found the letters that we exchanged back then, and when reading them, it’s obvious that even with an ocean between us, our connection had not lost any of its strength. When she finally returned to the states and spent the first few months back living with her sister in Florida, the letter-writing became more frequent, and the content became even deeper than before.

For you younguns out there, this is how we communicated before emailing and texting were invented.

When Rennie returned to New Jersey shortly before our senior year, we reunited near our home towns for dinner and a movie. The first of the “collisions” of the lines we referred to happened that night. (If you don’t understand the metaphor here then too bad! You’re missing out!) While Bruce took it as a sign that our friendship was moving on to the next level, Rennie didn’t see things quite the same way. Rennie was wrapped up in the friendship they had created, and the thought of losing it if things didn’t work between us was too much to handle. Bruce had already become her rock and she depended on him too much to take it for granted. As a result, our lines moved farther away from each other senior year (although still running alongside each other), while Rennie was dating someone else, and Bruce was busy partying and desperately hanging on to the last months of college life. Then in March of our senior year, something happened that Rennie has said “probably sealed our fate”.

When spring break approached, Rennie had no grand plans to travel anywhere exotic. Afterall, she had just returned from a full year abroad, traveling as often as she could. But there was someplace that she wanted to go, and since she was missing the fun times so often spent with Bruce, she asked him to go with her to visit her best friend who had gone to college in Lynchburg, Virginia. She thought she’d have to convince him so she sweetly kept calling it a “retreat for our friendship”. Bruce needed no convincing, however, as he still had it REALLY BAD for Rennie (REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BAD.). The trip ended up being unforgettable…the lines didn’t collide or anything, but it was nonetheless epic. The long eight hour rides back and forth seemed to fly by and the conversation and laughter was easy to come by. When we returned from the trip, things had most definitely changed. While we weren’t quite there yet, we became almost inseparable…seeing each other several times a week through the Spring and Summer (oh, and there was another one of those collisions along the way), and continuing through Rennie’s last semester when Bruce had already graduated but was living in New Brunswick with some of our friends. It was that last semester that did it. As the semester came to a close, Rennie asked Bruce if he wanted to go out for some celebratory drinks (with other friends too) after her last exam, on December 15. Again, she did not need to twist his arm.

Many drinks were consumed, and many laughs were had that night. In the span of those few short hours, something had changed in the space between us. We found ourselves sitting closer and closer to each other, legs touching under the table. We walked back to Bruce’s apartment and stopped in front to say good-night to each other before Rennie headed back to her dorm. We talked about how much fun the night was and about getting together during the holidays, when suddenly the two lines converged for good. It was not planned by either of us, but seemed instead to be the instantaneous culmination of our shared history. It was the moment when everything we had been through, both together and individually, brought our destinies together as one. Everything that had occurred between us over the past four years linked our souls together forever at that exact point in time, making each of us more than we had been just seconds before. We were no longer “Bruce and Rennie”…we were now “BruceandRennie”.

To say that the last 22 years have been a blur is an understatement. While the night that holds so much importance for us seems like it happened yesterday, it’s actually a half a lifetime ago for us. It also deserves to be mentioned that because of everything that our past held while we were “just friends”, this date is way more significant to us than our own actual wedding date is. In the half a lifetime that we have spent together, we have had our share of obstacles to overcome, and instead of being pulled apart, the universe pushed us even closer together. No change of job, no moving houses, no hotel living, not even MS has been able to keep us from growing together, as this single line that has always been pointing straight to our future together. In so many ways, we don’t even feel old enough to be together half our lives. I mean, we spend our free time laughing and joking, playing games, singing karaoke (badly by Rennie, but Bru is awesome at it), and just enjoying the shit out of each other because who the hell knows what tomorrow will bring? Bruce will always feel that Rennie “settled”, but the truth is that when it comes to all the important things, she could never find a better partner to walk beside her on this journey. The timing had to be just right for everything to fall into place such as it did, and that’s what happened on December 15, 1994.

For Bruce, it’s still hard to believe that he shares a life with Rennie. It all seems so absurd and crazy to him. Ever the cynic, he has often wondered how exactly all of the pieces fell into place, and why they happened the way they did. As we both reach middle-age, he’s beginning to understand that maybe…just maybe…there is a power to the universe that he never thought he believed in before. What else could possibly explain how all of the things that had to happen to bring Bruce and Rennie together occurred? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because they did. The only thing that really matters is that we are together now, and after weathering so many storms together, we are constantly reminded of (and grateful for) the fact that the universe did, indeed, unfold in exactly the way it was meant to.

It took 22 years for it to unfold for those two 22 year-old kids, who have now spent 22 years together. The best part is that it doesn’t matter what the universe has in store next for us, because we will spend our lifetime figuring it out together.  

Here we are: 22 years later, and happier than ever.