About my guy.

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a few months – the one in which I extoll the virtues of my guy – but I always stop myself because I’m secretly afraid that by openly celebrating my relationship I am jinxing it. You know, like the evil sprites will hear my laughter and thus plot against my future children, or something. But despite hundreds of years of folklore telling me this – I figure it’s probably okay to do a little celebrating of someone on their birthday – and so I’m going to ignore the superstitions this morning and just get down to it.

It’s been almost eight months now since I met Brian for a Sunday afternoon drink at Wazubee’s on the Drive – one of many men who answered my late-summer Craigslist posting, but the only one who I ended up meeting in person. Really, I had put my entreaty up and then realized shortly afterwards that perhaps I didn’t have the energy to meet a bunch of new people right at that moment. But this guy, well, the fact he was a union person intrigued me – and the short note he wrote me gave the impression of someone kind and humourous. Both of us clear that we were *only* looking for a casual, friendly kind of thing. Seemed worth at least a drink to suss it out and so I went.

We met at four in the afternoon, three drinks and dinner later he was walking me home, leaving my house sometime around eleven that night and only because I had an early morning flight to Ottawa and still hadn’t packed. Passing the time with him was amusing, we had lots to talk about, he had a lovely smile – and I thought, “hm. let’s see where this goes,” and then promptly left the city for ten days.

My travel schedule and his family schedule meant that even if we had wanted to rush into things, we quite literally could not, and so the development of our relationship has been paced, building incrementally but steadily since the day we met. It wasn’t love at first sight, nor was it characterized by early obsession, but instead has been a gradual intertwining – becoming a solid rooted thing that I have discovered my faith in through some of our recent trials.

Brian is no doubt the man for me. And even as I write this I shake my head in wonder at just how easy our connection is and has been. Both of us writers, happy to bang out songs on the guitar and sing along, wanting a mix of urban and rural, working in similar fields, creating home and community, politically and academically analytical – and yet our personalities quite different. Mine the more intense to his relaxed, a necessary polarity for a longlasting relationship.

One of the first things I noticed and appreciated about Brian was his sense of self. He just appeared grounded in who he was – his upbringing of political education and travel giving him an emotional self-reliance that was attractive to me, calming in a way. I immediately felt that he was himself and that I could be myself without fear of judgement – which is often not the case when just getting to know someone. And that initial impression has not wavered, even as I have come to realize what his self-doubts and emotional sore spots are, I am always dealing with someone solid, loyal, committed – to himself and the people important in his life. He is a man who accepts his responsibilities, not grudgingly, but as a part of who he is.

We’ve had a lot of stress since we started seeing each other – with his ex mostly, but also with my own political stuff – and at the same time when I sit here and think about the overriding feeling Brian brings into my life it is a calm, a sense of well-being. To be in his arms, to meet him at my door with a kiss, to rise to his caress – just feels… well, so damn good. Like I have always belonged right there. Like I will always belong right there.

I have a hard time with the future and the concept that any relationship will have one. Multiple reasons for this abound not the least of which is my failed marriage, or the fact that my life has been knocked around pretty hard in the last few years. But I recently have found myself believing in a partnership with Brian, that we have what it takes to make something longlasting together, and reveling in the hope that possibility brings. It’s a crazy feeling after so much fear and relationship loss to open myself up again and find that I have met a mate in the process. I am so much in love, so tenderly connected, and while I know this feeling eventually morphs into something quite different – I am convinced that we have enough other solid stuff to sustain each other’s interest for a long time.