Twenty years today with my ride or die.❤️🔥
Thomas Finn will take you on a little trip down memory lane.⬇️
Tonight at 9 p.m., it will be twenty years since I first saw her.
Sankt Hans Torv in Nørrebro. November 5, 2006. I rode my Raleigh over from downtown, with a little time to spare. Because I wasn’t born yesterday.
But the story actually begins a couple of weeks earlier, with a bank statement.
I had a profile on dating.dk, the biggest dating site in Denmark at the time. Not because I was looking, but as an experiment. I was deep into some personal development thing back then, and online dating was still new enough that it felt like something you ought to try, just to see what it did to you. I didn’t believe in it for a second. The idea that people could meet through a screen and become a couple. Maybe a hookup. Maybe an affair. But nothing that would last. So I’d exchanged a few messages with a couple of women, found nothing interesting, and forgotten all about it. Until I happened to notice on my bank statement that they were still charging me for the subscription.
That same evening, after dinner and after putting Oliver to bed, I sat down to close the profile so I could stop flushing money down the toilet.
And just before I clicked “cancel and delete,” I noticed a message.
“I think your profile is really good. Super honest, and you know what you want and what you stand for. I really damn well like that. Just a compliment from me to you 🙂 From K.”
No picture. No details. Just the tone.
I still don’t quite know why, but I wrote back. And then we messaged all evening. And the next. And the next. Somehow, the pictures that followed matched what I’d written down months earlier at a Tony Robbins seminar about what I was looking for. Then we talked on the phone. And messaged some more. Three weeks of mostly living in our imaginations, neither of us wanting to reveal too much too soon.
And then, suddenly, there she was in the dark. Walking across the square. In real life.
Most of what we talked about at the bar is gone. But I remember she was direct and in my face from the very first minute, confrontational as ever. Who are you? What do you want? What have you got to offer? Where are you headed? No warm-up. No small talk about the weather. I’d spent three weeks preparing, and she went straight to the final exam.
And yet it was one of those evenings when time doesn’t pass. It just exists. And suddenly someone tells you they’re closing.
So we moved on. Down into a basement bar.
She bought us beers. And when she sat down beside me, a little too close, I thought: Okay, then. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. She can always say no. So when she turned toward me, she found my face already moving in.
And then she tilted her head and made out with me until my calves practically cramped.
Okay. She certainly knew how to do that. Another point for her.
Then I walked her home. It wasn’t far, just over to Sankt Hans Gades Passage, but I walked as slowly as a human being can without actually standing still. At her door, I was about to say a polite goodnight, as a good Christian boy from Sorø does when he’s read his Bible and has a few very clear feelings throughout the lower half of his body about how an evening like this ought to end. If you’re going to do it right.
And then she invited me inside.
“That way you won’t have to bike all the way back to Frederiksberg. It’s getting a little cold, isn’t it?”
Twenty years later, that is still the most considerate line anyone has ever used to get me into bed. I should have seen through her plan. I should have recognized her wicked intentions, said no thank you, and pedaled home across the lakes with my conscience intact.
But who am I to say no to a pair of big, brown, pleading eyes?
So I leaned the Raleigh against the wall.
And at around 1:37 a.m., I’d guess, she knew—for the first time that night—that she would never need to look for anyone else again. 😁
And she was right, of course. We’ve been together pretty much every day since that first one. Oliver, who was three and a half and gained another mom. The podcast, the books, our businesses, everything we’ve built, and everything we’re still building.
She’s still the one who narrows her eyes at me and asks whether this is who I am. And I’m still the one who, twenty years later, answers: It is. Because you asked.
She’d sized me up correctly from a distance. We had a lot in common.
Twenty years. One square. One bicycle that never made it home that night.
If I could wish one thing for every person on this earth, it would be to believe in Love. To let themselves surrender to the fact that it is real. Deep. Hard. Wild. Transformative. Life-giving. And True.
That everyone might experience what I’ve experienced with this woman.
I can’t know whether she’ll stay for the rest of our days. But I will keep my part of the promise I made her, all the way Home.
❤️🔥🪽
….
Oh, right.
One more thing before you go to bed. The picture above was taken in the middle of Copenhagen, in front of the Marble Church, on a perfectly ordinary day, and everyone around us simply smiled.
On October 14, a young married couple from Bangladesh was executed in Saudi Arabia for what the authorities call “an indecent act.” According to their family, it was a kiss. I don’t know more than what can be known. But I do know there is a Law in this world under which a kiss between two married people can cost them their lives, and that there are people here in Denmark who think we should have more of that Law here.
Just something to keep in mind. The Law always comes with a bill.
Have a good Thursday evening, friends.
Remember what I wrote about Love. It matters.