Relationships

You Only Need To Have This One Thing In Common With Your Partner And Friends

But you do need a similar world view

Photo by The Paris Photographer on Unsplash

I never in a million years would have picked my husband on a dating app.

He loves baseball. I despise all sports. He is a perfectionist. I am a half-asser. He doesn’t read novels at all. I write them. His favorite pastime is recording music. I have a tin ear. He is almost a teetotaler. I love a good dive bar. He is a vegetarian. I like meat.

Not only that, but he is Dutch. When we met, he had just poured everything he had into starting a high-end hifi business in Heerlen, the Netherlands.

Yet I knew within a few minutes of meeting him that I would marry him. I called my dad that night — April 1, 2004 — to tell him I had met my next husband.

That’s how sure I was.

I didn’t tell Harrie, my husband of not quite 16 years as I write this, that I’d decided to marry him. I still had a boyfriend I needed to sort things out with.

Harrie finished his visit to his U.S. relatives and returned to the Netherlands without us having so much as kissed, but we started emailing and then chatting online, and a few months later I scraped up plane fare and visited…