There are so many reasons why I adore Kari, and on a near-daily basis, she reveals another aspect of herself, almost always by accident, like an incidental turn or bump of a kaleidoscope’s wheel, her light reflecting in brilliant, dazzling new patterns, captivating me all over again. I’ve never been so entranced by another person as I have been by her. I’ve also never laughed as much with another person as I have with her.
I’d like to take you back to the beginning of our relationship and share just one of what is an endless array of moments when she grabbed my hand and pulled me deeper into this hidden forest we discovered in the spring of this year, a forest where we had both been playing hide and seek for years, unknowingly, with one another.
Some time in the very beginning of our relationship—perhaps within the first week of our dating—in the middle of a conversation and unrelated to anything being discussed, she halted me with, “You remind me of Richard Gere.”
I paused, absorbing her words, and desperately tried to not smile too widely. “Good lord, this woman is into me,” I thought! Being compared to Richard Gere? Bona fide sex symbol of the ’80s and ’90s, leading man in Pretty Woman, An Officer and a Gentleman, and American Gigolo? No, this wasn’t lost on me. Hearing Kari say that I reminded her of this hunk of a man, my ego swelled like some absurdly huge potato that took the blue ribbon at last year’s county fair. And Gere had more than looks: he had a certain style, a certain appeal, a certain je ne sais quoi. In fact, I could list only a handful of gentlemen that she could have mentioned, and I would’ve been equally—
“Not his looks, though: his voice. You sound like Richard Gere.”
With a flat expression and as if this was all perfectly natural, she had picked out the most mundane and inconsequential of Gere’s features, sidestepped all conventional wisdom on how compliments work, and instead (and this is the important part) instinctively did this sort of Three Stooges bit, waving a compliment just over her left shoulder, and then, while I stood there wide-eyed and fascinated, jabbed me in the eyes with her right.
So you can see why I love her.
A few nights after the “compliment,” and after laughing over it once more, we pulled up an interview with Gere to see precisely what she meant about me sounding like him.
And that’s when Kari realized I did not, in fact, sound anything like Richard Gere, making the entire incident all the more funny. But it was never the point that I sounded like him. The point was that she loved my voice. And with that love, she encouraged me to read aloud to her. Some of our earliest nights together (continuing on now into our later nights together) consisted of us sitting beside one another while I read something out loud to her. The first book we read together was The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, a fantastic guide to making the most of your life.
Now, once a week on Sundays, we read aloud to each other. We’re currently reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron together in addition to the various books we’re reading separately. I never knew this was something I wanted, but the half hour that we spend together reading is something I look forward to as each weekend comes to a close. It’s our own personal little book club.
As a final note, as I wrap this up and prepare to give her a preview of what I’ve written, I have asked her whether she wants to read it or have me read it to her. Aww. Of course she wants me to read it. She always makes me smile.
The audio version of this essay, with the author, me, narrating, is available here.