To Know Someone

A Meditation on Intimacy

Today is my wife’s birthday. And I feel completely inept to give her anything close to what she has given me.

Photo by Jens Aber on Unsplash

The truth is that as soon as I met this woman, I knew her. I knew her like my own soul. In her face, I saw the reflection of a self I had not fully met, a person I felt dared to become.

It is a strange thing to know a person. I’m not sure most of us get to do it. To know someone means you understand them on a level they may not even understand themselves. It means you feel a part of them living inside you.

A good friend once described my wife as “the female version of you.” Sometimes, when she catches me doing the same thing she’s doing, or thinking the same thing she’s just thought, my wife repeats that phrase with a wink.

I once wrote a song for her, and it began with the line, “I think I married you when I met you.” It’s true.

Before we were married, before we got engaged, before we said our vows in the woods of rural Tennessee, before we bought a house and blended our families, before we started this leg of our journey and still lived in separate countries, thousands of miles apart, she called me “partner.” And that word, in spite of its glibness, is correct. She is my confidante, my friend, the only person whose opinion I concern myself with.

It feels blasphemous to say she is the one who makes life worth living, but that is what it’s like to know someone. It is a dance with the numinous, a glimpse at the invisible, the incomprehensible unity of it all. This must be what warriors bled and died for, what poets and artists lost their minds over. Not sex. Not requited love. But that which can never be possessed.

If it seems ridiculous to talk about another person like this, that may only be because it is so rare to truly know someone.

Let me put it like this.

Under our house, right now, is a churning sound reminiscent of the sea. This sound rocks back and forth. It seems to be coming from the air vent in the floor. I don’t know what it is, and my wife doesn’t, either. It might be the heater. It could be an animal trapped under the house. Maybe a monster.

Most of the time, we ignore this noise, pretend it’s not there. We move on with our day and pay little attention to it.

Sometimes, our kids hear it and make up explanations for what it could be.

The truth, though, is none of us knows what it is or what’s causing it. It doesn’t demand to be noticed, but still it remains, constantly churning. What might it do? We have no idea. It may have been here all along, and we are just now hearing it. All we know is that now we have heard it, we cannot forget it.

Years ago, I was struggling with existential questions about who I was and what life was about. I told a friend it felt like I had been treading water while attempting to describe the ocean floor. All my words and ideas were nonsense compared to reality. I said I was tired of paddling and that I wanted to see what was down there, even if it killed me.

“You know what’s down there?” he said confidently.

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Everything.”

Knowing someone is like that. It’s like coming to a door you never expected to find and turning the knob. It’s like crossing the threshold and hearing the handle click behind you. And now, there is no going back. Who you were before is unrecognizable. What you will become is unknowable. People may think you unreasonable, foolish, or even stupid, but none of that matters now. Because all they see is the door. And all you see is what’s on the other side.