On the eighteenth of March, 2006, Elaine sent me an e-mail that was sweet enough to still make me tear up a bit at reading it. We hadn't spoken in two months, and before that we hadn't spoken in six or seven, because we had realized that we were in love and she was not going to throw away the relationship she was in just like that. And I understood and respected that, but I also wasn't going to stand around waiting for something that may or may not happen. So she sent me a letter, on March 18th, 2006, saying things that I had wanted to hear for six years but hadn't expected she would ever said.

"No one makes me laugh like you do. No one understands me like you do. No one stimulates me emotionally and mentally like you do, Eliot Lefebvre. You have been my soul friend for the past six years, and an integral part of my identity. I love you and miss you, and I am afraid to see you, although I want to so badly... I have been in relationships constantly since I was fifteen years old. Now may be the time for me to break that cycle and discover myself. But I can't get you off of my mind.

I need my growth. But I need my best friend, too. I need to hear you laugh again. I need to hear you quote online comics incessantly (even though that drove me crazy sometimes!), and play video games with me again. Just to see your face will make me smile. I am going through an extremely dark time in my life right now, and you have always been a ray of sunshine to me.

I can't live without you in my life, either as friends or as more than that.

Please let me see your face again."

That was part of it. Not all, but part of it. I've saved it, because it matters, and because ironically enough it wasn't that that got us talking, but the fact that she couldn't wait until I happened to see it to talk to me.

So she called me, and told me she had sent it, then waited until after I'd read it and called her back. Which shouldn't have been romantic, but it was anyway.

We were friends again. But we weren't. We couldn't undo when we finally realized that we were in love, after all. Even from the first moment that we were speaking again, it wasn't quite the same as it had been before - there was more. There was love, there was hugging and kissing and an understanding that went beyond just friendship. I had known Elaine so long, through good times and bad, and I couldn't separate myself from her. I knew that then, even though she didn't want a relationship yet, and so we stayed friends in title.

On May 27th, we finally stopped pretending to ourselves. Not to the outside world, maybe, but we both look back and agree that it was then that we finally stopped trying to convince ourselves that we were just friends, if only for just a moment. The moment passed, and we tried to keep pretending, and kept saying we weren't dating... and for a few months, everyone got to watch us not date with the intensity that most people reserve for engagement ceremonies.

I forget what day we looked at each other and finally decided that claiming we weren't going out just wasn't funny any more. And we both agreed that that day didn't matter, because it was the 27th, two years ago today, that we really crossed the threshold into a relationship beyond friendship.

That was two years ago. Two years of work, effort, triumphs, failures, arguments, rage, resentment, compassion, resolution, growth, hurt, hope, and most of all love. I've had to grow in ways that I wouldn't have thought I was capable of before, discarding things that I thought were absolute necessities for myself, things I realized only belatedly were just crutches. I've learned to stand on my own in ways I hadn't been able to, I've found new goals, I've overcome fears.

But I wouldn't have if I hadn't been with her. Because she's my best friend, and Elaine won't let me settle for second best, or for just good enough. We push each other, stretch each other further and stronger, and have managed to take six years of friendship and meld it into two years of love and intimacy and make the whole thing work. Sometimes it's awkward, sometimes it's stuttering, but it hangs together through everything.

I am not drunkenly happy, though I have been at times. I am soberly, calmly, and completely in love, and content and happy with the progress of my life with the woman I love. And I couldn't be happier to be celebrating two years with her today.

Here's to proving everyone who knew us in college right.