30 Day Meme -- What Is Love?

Day 5: Your Definition of Love

UGH. Again. I mean, seriously, meme. Failing me yet again and yet again, here we go.

I think this is probably not a TERRIBLE topic for someone who is into emotions and feelings more than I am, but I’m just not. Emotions are for other people to think about and for me to have and be really good at hiding, THANK YOU.

Anyway. I didn’t believe in romantic love or marriage or any of that stuff until the love thing happened to me. I think this is a normal/common/average thing coming from people who are weird/ugly/fat/geeky/outside the traditional norm because you just kind of get disenchanted about the whole thing. Love is an illusion! A shared hallucination!

I still believe that, I just get to participate now.

I knew that I was in love with my girlfriend because I wanted to be around her A LOT. And, like, let’s be honest: I did not, nor do I now have a lot of friends.

I have talked about being unlikeable before! I’m NOT LYING. And I spent a lot of time with those few people who WOULD put up with me.

But Crystal… I don’t know. We spent a truly astounding amount of time together and yet, when she was gone, I still really, really missed her. It was actually pretty disgusting and I tried not to talk about it to other people because it embarrassed me that I had feelings at all, let alone this weird needy desperate ones.

I think I realized in like, August of 2007 (four months after we met) that I was basically in love with her, whatever the fuck I thought that actually meant. I wanted to tell her one time, while we were walking around my grandma’s backyard, but I pussied out because I still wasn’t sure she was gay. And I thought she was a slut! (No joke! Untruer thoughts have never been had.)

And it was basically like, “Well, I guess I’m in love with this dumb bitch.” And she was my best friend and we didn’t start dating until May of 2008, so I spent a lot of months feeling really tortured and unhappy and TERRIBLE. Because you are not, NOT supposed to fall in love with your straight, slutty best friend. Especially when you don’t even believe in love.

I was all fucked up.

Basically, I know/knew that I love(d) my girlfriend because I want(ed) to be with her. I liked being with her. Spending a day with her was comfortable and satisfying and good. And even though I was miserable and hurting and wanting because I didn’t have her, because she didn’t love me back, it never once (ONCE!) occurred to me to just… stop hanging out with her.

Also, I like to hold her hand.

I have never in my entire life liked holding hands. I hold hands with my mom sometimes in public because she gets embarrassed and says, “ASHLEY, people will think we’re lesbians!” But otherwise, handholding is not an activity I ever engaged in. But now I want to hold Crystal’s hand all the time. Not kiss, not touch her boobs. Hold hands. In public and not. It’s gross. And I hate myself.

Also, the idea of not being a couple makes me uncomfortable and unhappy. And the idea of her dying makes me miserable in the vomiting all over myself and having a panic attack kind of way.

I think love is whatever the fuck you make of it. The girlfriend and I have figured out a life together that makes us pretty happy and I think the person you manage to do that with is worth hanging on to, generally speaking.

I think loving your family and loving your friends is just as important as loving your partner. I think cultivating relationships with people who will laugh at your jokes and take you to the airport and drive you around for three hours when you’re crying and losing your shit because everything is awful and buy you ice cream in the middle of the night is incredibly hard and important and scary and amazing.

Vulnerability is literally the hardest thing in the entire history of human beings. Being straight up honest about the fact that you have feelings and that you NEED things, the entire idea that you need things from other people? That’s fucked up! And awful.

Which is exactly why I prefer to leave emotions to people who are better at having a lot of them. Like… Mexican soap opera actresses and teenagers.

30 Day Meme — Your First Love

Day 2: Your First Love

I’ve talked about her before, extensively, but my girlfriend Crystal is my first love. We had a really weird and complicated courtship because we were friends for more than a year before we finally talked about dating and I thought she was straight and she didn’t think I wanted babies/marriage (I didn’t/don’t, but I tricked her good!) and she made me promise that I would at least consider the possibility of children and marriage before she would date me. (She will say that I am lying and that “it wasn’t like that” but she will be lying through her fake front teeth.)

And then we did like lesbians do and moved in together really quickly. Or, rather, she moved in with me and my parents. Granted, we’d already planned to live together as roommates once we got our shit together, but that still hasn’t happened and we have sex, so I don’t think you can really call us “roommates”.

We’ve been together for two years, three months, and three days. We plan to eventually get married — she cares about the marriage license-y part where I have to legally agree to share my life with her, I only care about the awesome party — but I have a really complicated timeline that I deem acceptable for the development of our relationship and I don’t think we should get married for at least another three years. Or at the very least until we’re not living with my parents anymore. Which will probably be like, ten years at this rate.

I love Crystal because she is funny and smart and generous and takes care of me even though I usually fight her about it. I threaten to break up with her about once a week over both trivial and serious shit. Sometimes I’m joking, sometimes I’m just trying to make her cry. Because I’m a dick.

We like a lot of the same things and we get on each others’ nerves a pretty significant amount, which I constantly have to convince her is normal. (She thinks people who are in ~love~ should never fight or bicker, but let’s get real here.) We live in a 13×12 room together, so we’re on top of each other a lot and it’s hard when we want our own space. I was a SUPER SOLITARY person before we started dating/moved in together, so it is still weird for me to have someone around all the time who wants to hang out with me. I DON’T EVEN WANT TO HANG OUT WITH ME.

She’s pretty big on personal hygiene for herself so she usually smells nice and has soft hair, but is kind enough not to care if I don’t change my clothes for three days or if I have B.O. Also, she laughs at all my jokes, which is REALLY IMPORTANT. And she always supports my writing even if I get all pissed at her because she was TOO ENTHUSIASTIC or NOT ENTHUSIASTIC ENOUGH or MAKING TOO MANY SUGGESTIONS or NOT CARING ENOUGH GOD DAMN IT.

She puts up with my fickleness and my insanity and she buys me stuff ALL THE TIME.

My family loves the shit out of her too, which would be a 100% dealbreaker if they didn’t.

Anyway, she’s my first love basically because she has boobs and she lets me touch them. Usually whenever I want. She’s the best.

More narcissism here.

you turned me into somebody loved

I took this picture of my girlfriend Crystal in August of 2007, just four months after we first met. We were at a barbecue for my family celebrating all the August birthdays (my mom, my dad, and my aunt) and Crystal had come along. My family took to her immediately. We were just friends then, but I knew at this moment, this fraction of a second when I snapped the picture, that I was in love with her.

Now if you want to vomit, you’re not alone. I kind of want to puke all over myself too, but I’m trying to do this post all honest-like and that means there are going to be some ~emotions~ floating around loose on the air. Throw on a swine flu mask and you should make it through just fine.

Crystal is smart and funny and talented and generous and patient and kind and crazy and sweet and clever and loving and beautiful. My friends love her, my family love her, and she loves them back.

She likes my writing and my cooking and my jokes. She ALWAYS LAUGHS AT MY JOKES, which is like the number one thing I look for in a new friend.

She is terrified of everything: bugs, heights, the dark sometimes. It’s REALLY CUTE.

She loves so many of the same things I do and when I want to go out and do stuff she doesn’t, she sucks it up and does it anyway. BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME.

She was my friend first. We were friends for a year and a half before we ever tried dating. Granted, my friends and family were already calling her my girlfriend based on the sheer amount of time we spent together, but whatever. And maybe we did it once or twice. BUT WE DID NOT DATE. We were not emotionally entangled like a couple. And then we were.

And at first it was crazy and everything felt like this:

But eventually we got it figured out and tomorrow will be our second anniversary. (Someday I will tell the story of that faithful “getting together” conversation and how, just as we were starting to have celebratory sex, she got a bloody nose ALL OVER MY CHEST. But today is no day for that.)

I don’t know entirely how we’ve made it this far.

But I love her more every single day. And without her I’d have trouble functioning. My novel wouldn’t be getting written, I wouldn’t be surviving school, hell, I wouldn’t have ever even applied for the MFA program.

I love you, bub. Thank you so much for two amazing years.