There’s so much I could say, yet I am just not certain what I am comfortable saying. On the Internet, every word spoken is permanently etched into the fabric of time. It can virtually never be unpublished. And it’s hard to know where the line is between sharing a healthy amount of my life so that others may follow along through the highs and lows, and oversharing.
But today, I’m going to lean the other way. I want to express my happiness and I don’t care who sees it! Because for the first time in forever, I truly am happy.
One month ago today, my friend and I spent hours talking about perhaps being more than friends. We have moved up to officially being boyfriend and girlfriend now, and I couldn’t be more pleased. He makes me feel loved. He makes me feel heard and seen. He respects me. He treats me well. He’s everything I always wanted, and everything I feared I would never have.
I feel safe with him, in a way I don’t feel safe with anyone else. He gives me so much joy, so much to happiness. When I pray at night, he’s one of the first blessings in my life I give thanks for. There were so many times I felt unloveable. I felt like I needed to settle because that was the best I could ever do. I felt like I had to take abuse because who would want to treat someone like me better than that, anyway?
And yet here he is. Here this amazing, wonderful man is, to actually treat me not just better, but to treat me well. The way I was told I deserve. The way I believed no man could ever love a woman like me. Because of my birth defect. Because of my sleep schedule. Because of my silly idiosyncrasies. Because of my obsessions with so many wide ranges of subjects: Dalmatians, computers, old tech, veterinary medicine, media, music, sports, him.
He doesn’t love me despite that. He loves me for me, and accepts that I’m not perfect, and he doesn’t need me to be. And I am all too happy to report that I, too, love him for him. He isn’t perfect and doesn’t need to be. He just needs to be there, to be my sweetie, to be the best him that he can be. That’s all I could ever ask for, and that’s all I could ever want or need in my life.
And he is.