What was the best decision you ever made?

David asks: "What was the best decision you ever made?" The most influential decision I ever made, which in a very long roundabout way led to the best one I ever made fourteen years later, was many years ago. I'll keep the story short:

I was at university in the UK. I was not a great one for going out to nightclubs, but for some reason when some blokes came around selling tickets for a Cricket Club dance at a local nightclub, I was determined to go. I convinced some friends to go too, pointing out that the blokes selling the tickets were very good-looking and there were going to be more of them at the dance. My friends wondered what had got into me that I actually wanted to go to a nightclub, but agreed that we would all go. This despite the fact that it was on a Wednesday night, and I usually turned into a pumpkin on weeknights by 10:30 p.m.

So we went. I didn't meet any nice men from the Cricket Club. I did, however, end up dancing all evening with T. from the Boston University Rugby Club.

We ended up writing to each other after he returned to the United States, and the following summer I flew over here to visit him. My first visit to the United States! I had a nice visit, though it was clear by the end of it that the romantic relationship wasn't going to go anywhere, he was a good person to have as a friend. He was already looking ahead to when he would graduate from BU, and planning where he would go to graduate school - preferably somewhere overseas. This was a revelation to me. I had never thought of going to graduate school, nor of studying abroad to get an actual qualification, despite the fact that I was about to spend a year in France for my undergraduate degree. I spent a lot of time thinking about that over the next couple of years, and eventually ended up applying to an American university to do a Master's degree. (No language problem, sorta, and they funded me!)

Had I not made the decision to go to that dance, I would never have met T., would never have visited Boston, and in all likelihood would never have considered coming to the US to study. It's amazing to think that I can pinpoint so precisely the first in a long chain of decisions that led me to life here in the US and the best decision I ever made - to marry my Dear Husband.