That's me! That's me!

As a sign of true love and devotion, Mike sat through the entire finale of The Bachelorette with me last night. Groaning and rolling his eyes through much of it he kept saying under his breath, "He's such a BS-er," whenever Jef said something like, "She completes every part of me!!" or "I've never loved anyone like this!"

I think he probably deserves a golden badge of courage (or sympathy).

Before Jef proposed, he and Emily exchanged little I-love-you-imonies. I told Mike that when we got home, I wanted to do the same thing, sitting up in bed, holding hands.

We got home and tucked ourselves under the covers. He began to tell me how much he loved me, and in true Michael fashion, peppered his words with appropriated phrases from great thinkers and poets and finished with playing me a clip from David Brook's TEDtalk last year (go to 15:27 if you want to hear it from him). In it, he quotes a portion from a book where a man who recently died comes across a photo of his wife and writes:

"I looked at her face and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes. And all at once I found myself saying as tears flowed, 'That's me! That's me!' and those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before; about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity; about the fact that the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children; about the notion that those hopes weren't separate and distinct hopes, but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us into a unit; the kind of unit that I had but dimly imagined before beign married and having children. I realized that though Carol had died, that core piece of her had night died at all, but had lived on very determinedly in my brain."

Swoon.

I love my Michael Neal.