You can't hurry love

This week, as our house overflows with an exorbitant double-shower yield of diapers and pink gifts, my husband Jonathan and I remember a small but sacred anniversary: the day of the blanket fort.

It all began with a Chinese fortune cookie I received on Sept. 25, 2013. I usually put little stock in the slender blue-typed forecasts that slide out of cookies to distract buffet-goers from their own indigestion. But this one came well-timed. It said only, “Be invited.” Chinese fortune cookies are not supposed to change your life. But “Be invited” changed mine.

That September, like any twentysomething romantic studying British literature, I thought every angst-ridden love poem Philip Sidney wrote in the 1500s actually described me. In the previous three years I had also grown fond of the biblical Ruth, the woman who did not wait for flowers and chocolate to arrive at her door before lying down on the threshing floor and proposing.

Surrounded by young Christian men who had spent years breathing in ideas of emotional purity and stiffly rule-bound approaches to dating that often resulted in immobility, I wanted to be as revolutionary as Ruth. I wanted to become the hammer that broke the safety glass surrounding their hidden emotional worlds. I was a little bit right, a little bit wrong, and a whole lot dramatic. If no one would invite me into a relationship, then, I decided in my heart, I would do the inviting myself. This did not go well for me, and it took a long time for me to swallow the idea expressed so timelessly by The Supremes: “You can’t hurry love. No, you just have to wait.”

By the time the fortune came around in my 21st year, I felt like I had already waited forever. But I yielded to the advice, maybe because I had already tried everything else. And a month and three days later during Hurricane Sandy, I got invited. The invitation came in the form of a text message and said, “Meet me in the student lounge. Bring a mug.”

Since Sandy had canceled class, Jonathan and his bandmates, for fun, had constructed a blanket fort on the top floor of one our college’s academic buildings. When I arrived there—wet, blushing, and accompanied by a friend for moral support—Jonathan invited me inside, where he filled my mug from the burbling coffeemaker as the three played a private concert for me on the strings. The go-and-get-the-girl words of their original song caught me and kept me with the recurring refrain, “If you want her, you’ve got to show your love.”

In those moments I realized the fortune cookie had advised me well. I resolved: “Do not spoil this love by hurrying it, Chelsea Lynn. He is skilled at invitation, and you don’t want to miss a second of it.”

Waiting for love can become one of the most painful periods of a person’s life. You can spend eons searching for the perfect formula to win love for yourself. You can blame its lack on men or women who live behind glass walls, and they will partially deserve it. But, sometimes, you just have to wait. Then, before you know it, your house will be full of diapers.