Episode 29: More Than Soul Mates

Judy and I had started in San Francisco and landed in Paris at 6am after a long flight with no sleep. Since our room wasn’t ready and we were starving, we wandered Paris aimlessly, eventually ending up eating German food when we should have been eating the world’s best cheese, bread and wine.

Afterwards, we dragged ourselves back to the hotel and waited in the lobby for our room to be prepared.

The lobby, like most hotels in Europe, was quite small. The mod art deco design we saw in the hotel’s pictures on the web was transformed into reality by strangely shaped, furry couches of red and yellow and accent tables that shimmered silver. Up on the wall was a TV that had bubbles coming out of its screen – literally. It was the first passive 3D television we had ever seen. Tres cool…

Finally prepared, we found our room quite surprising: A bed with no frame to hold it up so that it appeared to float in mid-air, a bathroom made entirely of translucent glass, and a ceiling painted like a cloudy night sky that had small blue LED lights for stars. In any other instance, this combination could have easily come off feeling like a cliché room in a honeymoon hotel in the Poconos , but the attention to detail and the quality of the materials made for uber-sheek. The fact that the room was in Paris rather than Pennsylvania probably didn’t hurt either.

After a good night’s sleep, the question was what to do first, at least for most couples it is. One of the amazing characteristics about the different type of relationship Judy and I share is that we tend to think alike – almost identically alike. Whereas another couple might come to Paris with different ideas of what to do – she wants to see all the museums while he prefers to photograph the architecture – Judy and I had the exact same plan for our time in Paris…and that was to have no plan at all. In fact, our shared plan did not include any museums, tourist sites, or schedules. We were both fried from work and the book project. All we wanted was relaxation and each other.

Instead of running around like crazed tourists, we just sauntered the city hand in hand. We’d look down a street, see an old, beautiful building covered in ivy or a gold encrusted sculpture and say, “look at that old building” or “isn’t that architecture fabulous?” Then, we’d stop at a sidewalk café, order some delectable food and watch Parisians and tourists walk by– all the while we would hold hands and exchange that same never-ending kiss we had been sharing since we first met. Then, with our stomachs full and lips sufficiently loved-up, we once again would walk amongst the centuries-old monuments that define Paris, ever watchful for that next perfect sidewalk café where we could share another kiss over a bottle of wine.

For some couples, the City of Lights might allow more love than usual to come to the surface, but for Judy and me it was really just more of the same deeply connected, life altering love that we had always shared. No arguments, no struggles, no compromises. We are more than soul mates.

All the more incredible is that I engineered this love, this relationship.

And this is the very same relationship our book was going to help others to find.

Click here for Episode 30: The Hotel is on Fire…Salute!