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When I was in graduate school in DC a friend told me no one would want to be with me because I knew I'd be moving after finishing my PhD.

A few months later, I met this cute guy named Adrian. I didn't know if anything would come of it, but he was a nice guy, so we saw more and more of each other.

9 months after meeting I learned that, before returning to Colorado Springs to teach, I'd be spending another year in a school in Alabama. It was one thing to ask Adrian to come with me to Colorado...Alabama was another matter entirely.

I told him I'd like him to come with me...I even got down on one knee and asked. But I also suggested he not make a decision yet, because honestly, we hadn't even been together a year.

Just before our first anniversary we visited Colorado and he seemed to like it. We had fun here, and I guess he decided a year in Alabama was a small price to pay to come here.

So in July 2002 we left Washington DC for Alabama, a hellhole to be sure, but a place in which we had some interesting experiences and met up with some great people. We visited briefly about a month before the move, to find a place to live and bring some stuff down to put into storage, and also enable Adrian to start looking for a job. He got one right away, which was nice, because I later learned he wasn't sure about moving with me until that point.

Then in the summer of 2003 we moved here to Colorado. This is not an easy place to live...we are in a very conservative town, I taught at a very conservative school, and we are far from his home. Our arrival was strange...the first night, we weren't able to eat at the restaurant where we wanted to because we weren't dressed well enough. Two days later our stuff arrived and was dumped into a house with old carpet that smelled and cat pee and scraps of recently removed wallpaper. Adrian was not a happy camper when the stuff was placed in the house, a house that was about 800 square feet smaller than the one we'd just left.

We painted, an amazing job I might add, a paint job that later helped sell the house in a day. We recarpeted. We got new (retro) furniture. Adrian painted some artwork for the dining room. We made friends. Adrian got a job...then another one...then another one. I traveled a lot for work, then went off to a war for a few months. We took trips together, to Paris, Honolulu, San Francisco, San Diego, Thailand, Laos, and of course, to DC a few times. The job I'd been looking forward to wasn't everything I'd hoped. We got iPods. Adrian started drinking at Starbucks. We became closer with old friends and sadly lost touch with some as well. We visited Wyoming. We both grew a lot.

In a few hours we'll get up, toss our bags into the cars, and head east. It's time for the final part of this adventure: the drive home. After 4 years we will be moving back to Washington DC on Sunday. We have already bought a home, our first together. Adrian has a line on a new job. I'm leaving teaching (for now) to be an international negotiator for the government. Our friends are mostly still there, and with all the visits we've made back east, they are still a big part of our lives.

I'm ready for whatever comes next. The book may close on this adventure, but there are plenty of more books to be written in the decades to come.

Thank you, Adrian, for making the decision to join me. I love you.