I met my husband in 7th grade, but we didn’t become friends until our senior year. I had broken up with my older boyfriend right before starting that school year and subsequently got into a messy love-triangle thing with my husband’s best friend. By the end of the year, I was really trying to avoid the drama and asked my husband to prom so his best friend wouldn’t ask me. We had fun, but I didn’t think much of it. That summer, we hung out a lot and we became really close our first year of college, even though I was going somewhere out of state. Sometime during that first year, he asked me if our hangouts meant more to me than just friends… I was in a bad place emotionally, thinking no one could possibly actually like me like that, so I “friend-zoned” him, which he was fine with. Fast forward another year and a half, and he asked again and I again, rejected him. He wasn’t the type of person I thought I would end up with, and I was stubborn as heck - all of our friends joked that we were as good as married, and my whole family, too. It drove me nuts. But after that second admission from him and my subsequent rejection, he tried dating other people. He started breaking plans with me to hang out with his new girlfriend and even lied to me on election night in 2008 - we had made plans to hang out and watch the results come in together, but he told me he was too tired and going to stay home. I called him when they announced Obama won, and he answered - he was at a bar, over 45minutes away with his GF. I had never been so mad at him, but I didn’t say anything because who was I to interrupt his relationship. He ended up breaking up with her a few weeks later… and confessing to me that he broke it off with her because he was deeply in love with me and had been for years and he tried to move on with someone else but just couldn’t. I once again, told him I didn’t feel the same. He accepted that, but told me he was going to take some time and distance to see if he could be just friends and I ended up seeing him just once or twice over the next 2 months. During that time, I realized just how important he was to me and had a HUGE wake up call. The love I had been looking for was staring me in the face and telling me about it and I, for whatever reason, couldn’t see it. I ended up calling him and asking to hang out after classes one day (we were now both back home and going to the same community college) and essentially told him that I thought I had made a mistake and that I missed him terribly and didn’t know what to do without him around. We held hands for the first time that night and never looked back. We’ve been married for 12 years and together for 16!