Our relationship started long before we met.

Girl meets boy, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl get married, this is how love starts. And when you think about it, most love stories start that way.

Every moment leading up to the one in which you meet your future husband or wife somehow shapes you and prepares you for that person you were fated for.

The previous heartbreaks or dark days or lonely nights can be crucially important in the grand scheme of things—sometimes we need to know what something feels like when it’s wrong before we can ever really know it when another thing is right.

So that’s why I need to start the story with a little bit of background. The whole “girl meets boy, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl get married” model is a little too simplistic for my needs. You people want details, don’t you? Of course you do.

When I was 18 years old and working as a waitress at a little family restaurant, I met a guy who was 10 years older than me. He was the one who came before Matthew. We dated for three and half years, and even lived together during the last year and half of that relationship.

We moved into a tiny little house and owned a few belongs together and our relationship was never a terrible one. He was a good guy, I was a good girl, and we really did love each other.

But for every moment of those three and a half years, I had a nagging, itching and aching feeling that he would never be the right one for me.

Despite his great heart, he lacked ambition and drive and handled his finances very poorly and, at the heart of it all, was very insecure despite being a bright and attractive guy.

I understood him, though. I understood that his family had never prepared him for life, and the poor decisions he had made as a younger man had caught him in a sticky web and a hole he just couldn’t seem to dig himself out of.

As the years went by, he could give me less and less of what I needed. Things became strained between us. I was a terrible nag, and I see that now. But the problem was that there were just too many things about him that I wanted to change.

And as I began to realize that I could never change him and shouldn’t have to, I struggled so much with what the right thing to do was. It ate away at me day and night, because I honestly couldn’t imagine my life without him. And being alone terrified me.

Somewhere during all this, I read the book The Secret which is all about the law of attraction. I really, really believed in what it said. It inspired me. I realized that I had not arranged my life in a way that allowed for all the things I so desired.

I hate to skim over this because it’s so important, but let’s just say that I knew I had to decide what I wanted my future to look like and start taking active steps towards attracting that future. And staying in my current relationship at the time was a major roadblock. I knew in my heart that if I stayed where I was, life would always be a struggle.

So one day, the breakup finally happened. We talked and cried for hours and finally decided that we could never truly work.

I can honestly say that the 48 hours after that break up were the toughest of all my life. I ugly-cried those kind of tears that come from somewhere inside you didn’t even know existed—a place of fear and sudden awareness that you are completely alone.

And that’s the place I was in when I met him. We met a mere 48 hours after the ex and I called it quits, which could either be considered really terrible timing or really great timing. I choose to believe the timing was perfect.

But the truth is, things haven’t always been super easy.