- This December, my wife and I will have been married for 20 years.

If you had asked her back then how long we'd last, she'd say 20 seconds, which is fair.

You'd be hard pressed to find two more opposite people.

I'm a hopeless romantic and she's more of a realist.

I like hip hop.

She likes punk rock.

I watch fantasy and sci-fi.

She likes true crime documentaries.

It'd be pointless going over all the differences we have because we'll be here all night.

She's very shy.

And I like going on stage and talking about my life with complete strangers, very nice strangers.

When we first met on board the USS Gonzalez, two young sailors on deployment, I could barely focus on fighting terrorism.

I was entirely focused on getting closer to her.

Some might call it stalking.

I prefer to call it creative observation.

Early on, she had no interest in getting closer to me.

I figured she must be a lesbian.

I mean, come on.

I'm a catch and modest, nuanced.

I can't tell you exactly why I was so enamored off the bat, only to say there was something intangible about her, unique, that I had never encountered before.

And sure, she's lovely and she's smart and she's warm when she wants to be.

But in life, there are challenges in finding and holding on to someone that you love.

Both then and now there are narratives everywhere we look that tell us what seems so fundamental is anything but.

We are compelled to question concepts like monogamy and matrimony and child rearing in our modern world that has become so adept at finding the cracks and the foundations of what seems so traditional.

We're left with men and women struggling and striving to find what's fulfilling and thrilling about life.

In a world that's so full of drab gray, is it possible to find vibrant color in one another?

And in some measure, she had accepted some of these narratives into her own life.

What is happiness?

What is joy?

And God and his infinite sense of humor put into her life a hopeless romantic.

So I put aside my gentle ego and I got to work.

I assured her we'll just be friends, which was a complete lie.

Not the way I prefer to start our life together, but I'll take what I can get.

And I used to visit her on the ship and I would sneak out on watch and I would see her.

And don't tell the Navy this, they hate this part of the story, but under the guise of this platonic relationship, we would spend a lot of time together.

And early on, we realized that we are complete opposites.

There's no way this is going to work.

We are doomed before we even start.

But there was no denying that the buds of began to bloom of our early romance.

I'm sorry, friendship.

And we spent all our time together and we would talk and it was safe and it was comfortable and it was nice and it was different and powerful.

Even in our conflicts, we would tell things and reveal things about one another that I hadn't known and she hadn't known, but it wasn't easy.

I mean, we fought and we argued and we broke up and we got back together again.

Always unsure, always unwilling to be apart from each other for too long, but unable to part ways.

I was the sun and she was the moon, apart, worlds apart, but inexorably linked.

And then one day I decided I would ask her to marry me.

I had no idea what she was going to say.

And in reality, she said what we both knew to be true.

We're so different, Noel.

And she was right.

I am wind and she's earth.

Even our horoscopes didn't want us to be together.

But it was at that moment that I realized the answer.

I would disagree with her.

I said, "Honey, you're wrong.

We are the same.

Innately, we both believe in truth, in family, in honesty and loyalty.

We share a wondrous faith in each other, in God, and in the heart of life's possibilities.

Fundamentally, intrinsically, we are the same."

And then a miracle happened.

We finally agreed on something.

And for a moment, I saw her worries and her doubts dissipate like dead leaves on the wind of her soul.

And she said, yes.

On December 8th, 2006, we were married.

And then we had our son, Ethan, and then we had our daughter, Bethany, and then we had our daughter, Elizabeth, and then we had our vasectomy.

Kids are mad expensive, yo.

But make no mistake, we are still worlds apart, maybe even more so now than then.

But neither one of us are complete without the other, and that's love.

My name is Noel David Goodman.

Thank you very much, guys.