How I Met My Partner

My coincidence is a rather long story, and it has its start long before I was born. I write this, of course, understanding that it can really only be considered a coincidence given how it has resulted in finding my current partner. If it had not had this result, it simply would have resulted in nothing more than an interesting story. And so I take you to the very beginning, which is post-civil war Spain. The government is currently taken over by Dictator Francisco Franco who was the leader of the Falange movement. With the beginning of his rule also came a series of new laws the limited free speech, women´s rights, among others. Most relevant to this story, was the repeal of the right to divorce that was implemented under the previous government. Because people were now no longer allowed to get divorced, there were cases were couples simply separated by moving to different regions and continued their lives apart (I´m certain deciding to do this would have resulted in several consequences, the harshest of which likely affected the woman in the relationship). One of the men who decided to proceed with such an act was in fact the man who would become my grandmother´s first husband. It’s a very standard story, when a woman meets a man and they fall in love and decide to get married. Not too long after my grandmother got pregnant and gave birth to my aunt. This is where the details get a little blurry (and the accuracy of the story becomes increasingly questionable) as these are portions of the story my grandmother has told rather reluctantly. It seems that my grandmother discovered (and we have yet to know how) that her husband was in fact married to a women in a different region of Spain. My grandmother, a woman who did not believe in divorce, decided to leave her husband. Through contacts she had at the church, they falsified documents for her so that she could leave her husband and begin a new life where she could claim she was a widow. My grandmother packed her things, took my aunt, and left to begin a new life as a teacher in a new part of Spain. It is here that she spends about a year rebuilding her life and taking care of her child. Until one day my aunt becomes terribly sick. My grandmother decided to call a friend of hers from the town she was not working in as a teacher who was a doctor. He came to see my aunt and apparently also ended up falling in love with my grandmother. Through their relationship, my grandmother got pregnant once again and gave birth to my mother. The exact details of what happened between the doctor and my grandmother are not clear and I don´t expect us to ever get much clarification on their relationship. However, whatever may have happened, the result was my grandmother returning to the church for new documentation that changed the time of death of her first husband, making him the legal father of my mother as well as my aunt; allowing them both to share the same last name and avoid any social exclusion to my mother for being a child born out of wedlock. Fast-forward to about the time when my aunt is 16 years old and dating the man she is currently married to. My 16 year-old aunt, for some reason, believes she has seen her father in Barcelona. She remembers him from the pictures my grandmother has and is sure that it´s him. Eventually, life happens, my aunt and her boyfriend at the time break up and move on to marry new people, who they eventually divorce before getting back together at the age of 40. When they finally get back together at this stage, my aunt insists on trying to find her father. They hire an investigator, and oddly enough, before finding her father they find the son he had from the previous marriage to my grandmother. This turn-of-events impacts my aunt for the rest of her life. Her half-brother instantly becomes family to her. She meets his wife, cousins, nephews, and gains a whole new family in a town near Portugal called Benavente. Together, my aunt and her half-brother continue the search for their father, eventually finding him in 2003. My aunt, upon meeting her father, explains that she is sorry my mother could not be there as well to meet him. Apparently, her father turns to her, shocked and exclaiming that he only ever had one child with my grandmother. This is when the giant can of worms opens, and my grandmother learns that her sister is really her half-sister. She confronts my grandmother to try and understand the full story. My grandmother refuses to speak on the issue and warns against saying anything to my mother. It would be ten more years until my mother was informed that she had another father, who was very much alive and who wanted to meet her. Eventually, the news also reaches me. When it does, I learn my mother has tried to speak with him but he has refused to see her. An act that surprised my whole family after he allegedly spent years trying to communicate with us. This leads me on a mission to confront my grandfather. I fly to Spain and drive up to the mountains where he lived in a small house, with two dogs, and a women and her son who took care of him. He was over 90 years old. When he agreed to speak to him, I wasn’t prepared. I had expected him to turn me away. Instead, we sat on a bench outside his house and spoke for about an hour. I promised to write to him. Unfortunately, this is a promise I broke. My own life took me down other roads. I moved to Peru where I unfortunately found myself in an abusive relationship for about a year. Eventually, I was able to get out and go home. It took me two years to find a job and start a life again. It was at this point when I decided I wanted to go home, to Spain and to my family. I called my aunt and uncle to ask if I could stay with them, and they said they would gladly let me stay for as long as I wanted. I arrived in home in Barcelona April 8, 2016. The next day, my aunt received a call. It was the favourite nephew of her half-brother (he is the son of my aunt´s half-brother´s wife´s sister). He had moved to Barcelona for work about a month before and was taking my aunt up on her offer to have him over for lunch anytime. She said it was perfect timing, which her niece was also there. And from that day, April 9, 2016, he and I have been inseparable. And sometimes I think it might be destiny how we found each other. Sometimes I think that everything happened so we could meet. And other times I realize, it was just a string of bad and good coincidences which have somehow led to something extremely positive for both of us.