Love is being stupid together. ~Paul Valery
We're all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness - and call it love - true love. ~Robert Fulghum,True Love
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We're all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness - and call it love - true love. ~Robert Fulghum,True Love
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Valentine’s Day is starting to fill every conceivable space. The red and white menace is creeping like some horrid form of kudzu into retail space both real and virtual. The front page of Etsy screams at you every time you log on, reminding you exactly how many days it is until that most hellish of holidays.
Sigh. Great. One more year when I won’t get flowers. One more year when I won’t have anyone to buy anything for myself. One more year alone.
It’s enough to make somebody my age start to think about options, settling, just finding someone, ANYONE, and getting it “over with.” I think a part of me would just die, though. If all I wanted was just a ring, even I probably could have managed that at some point in the past. Granted, I am not beautiful. No line of guys has ever stood outside my door hopefully waiting for my notice, but probably, I could have found somebody if I were diligently looking. (This is my story, and I’m sticking to it.)
It’s always been about more than this to me, though. I don’t want just somebody. I am looking for something specific. Oh, I don’t mean some sort of magic, eyes-meeting-across-the-room moment. I did that once, remember? It went very, very badly, and I don’t think I’m particularly interested in going through it again. What I want in a man is something a lot more complex and apparently a hell of a lot harder to find. Who knew that the electric rush, the magic, Disney scene was the easy thing to get hold of? (Okay, so T. shouldn't be classified as Disney. He was never G-rated, not even that first look he gave me...)
I want someone I can talk to. I don’t mean that in the trite sense. I don’t need an audience. I mean I want someone who can keep up, participate. He doesn’t have to be an expert in the things I love; I’m not looking for a twin or a mirror. I don’t want us to wear matching outfits. I don’t want him to give up who he is and what he loves for me. I just want to find someone who is interested in at least some of the same things as me. I want compatibility. I want a friend. When I say, “Oh, that’s awesome,” I’d love it if he were right there beside me saying, “Too right. Let’s go.”
That’s the core of it in a nutshell. Oh, there are all kinds of little physical attributes I gravitate toward. If you can’t tell from my comments and the pictures of “pretty men” I post here and on Tumblr on rare occasions, I seem to like them tall and blue-eyed (no real hair color preference), built strong but not bulky, like a swimmer or a soccer player. Personality-wise, I like them brilliant, into everything, cynically funny, musical, and just a little (or maybe more than a little) dark. None of this is really the key, though. The essential thing, the thing that matters, is that connection of the minds, those threads of commonality.
Ultimately, then, I guess I’m looking for somebody who will go on adventures like I went on yesterday to take pictures and protect me from myself when I’m not paying attention and who I can also depend upon to pin me against a wall and kiss me senseless when needed. Somebody who is passionate about the world and all this wonder there is in it, wants to see it with me, and is also passionate about me, can be passionate with me. I’m looking for a best friend I can wake up next to every morning, can come home to every night.
I don’t think this will make everything perfect. I do not expect any relationship to be a rainbow of hearts and flowers. After all, even with the friends that I have now, disagreements still occur. Even with my very best friend, the one I’ve had since I was five, there have been hard times and moments when the two of us didn’t connect very well, and she knows almost literally everything there is to know about me. She’s also a girl. There’s not that gender barrier that is bound to cause crap between us. I can’t imagine, though, any sort of relationship with a man being of any use or worth wasting a minute over if it wasn’t this. Anything else would be something so inferior, something so obviously doomed to fail, something so tremendously less than what it could be. Why would anyone ever settle for that?
I suspect that waiting for this, the ideal of this, is why I’m still alone. I may never get this. Maybe it’s unreasonable. I’m going to keep waiting, though. The alternative, occupying myself with people I know don’t fit the bill just to pass the time, is every bit as grim to me as simply being alone. Therefore, while it’s going to be so hard to watch the rest of the world “bill and coo” this Valentine’s Day, I guess I’ll just turn my head and hope for better in the future. I don’t really know what other option I have.
Sigh. Great. One more year when I won’t get flowers. One more year when I won’t have anyone to buy anything for myself. One more year alone.
It’s enough to make somebody my age start to think about options, settling, just finding someone, ANYONE, and getting it “over with.” I think a part of me would just die, though. If all I wanted was just a ring, even I probably could have managed that at some point in the past. Granted, I am not beautiful. No line of guys has ever stood outside my door hopefully waiting for my notice, but probably, I could have found somebody if I were diligently looking. (This is my story, and I’m sticking to it.)
It’s always been about more than this to me, though. I don’t want just somebody. I am looking for something specific. Oh, I don’t mean some sort of magic, eyes-meeting-across-the-room moment. I did that once, remember? It went very, very badly, and I don’t think I’m particularly interested in going through it again. What I want in a man is something a lot more complex and apparently a hell of a lot harder to find. Who knew that the electric rush, the magic, Disney scene was the easy thing to get hold of? (Okay, so T. shouldn't be classified as Disney. He was never G-rated, not even that first look he gave me...)
I want someone I can talk to. I don’t mean that in the trite sense. I don’t need an audience. I mean I want someone who can keep up, participate. He doesn’t have to be an expert in the things I love; I’m not looking for a twin or a mirror. I don’t want us to wear matching outfits. I don’t want him to give up who he is and what he loves for me. I just want to find someone who is interested in at least some of the same things as me. I want compatibility. I want a friend. When I say, “Oh, that’s awesome,” I’d love it if he were right there beside me saying, “Too right. Let’s go.”
That’s the core of it in a nutshell. Oh, there are all kinds of little physical attributes I gravitate toward. If you can’t tell from my comments and the pictures of “pretty men” I post here and on Tumblr on rare occasions, I seem to like them tall and blue-eyed (no real hair color preference), built strong but not bulky, like a swimmer or a soccer player. Personality-wise, I like them brilliant, into everything, cynically funny, musical, and just a little (or maybe more than a little) dark. None of this is really the key, though. The essential thing, the thing that matters, is that connection of the minds, those threads of commonality.
Ultimately, then, I guess I’m looking for somebody who will go on adventures like I went on yesterday to take pictures and protect me from myself when I’m not paying attention and who I can also depend upon to pin me against a wall and kiss me senseless when needed. Somebody who is passionate about the world and all this wonder there is in it, wants to see it with me, and is also passionate about me, can be passionate with me. I’m looking for a best friend I can wake up next to every morning, can come home to every night.
I don’t think this will make everything perfect. I do not expect any relationship to be a rainbow of hearts and flowers. After all, even with the friends that I have now, disagreements still occur. Even with my very best friend, the one I’ve had since I was five, there have been hard times and moments when the two of us didn’t connect very well, and she knows almost literally everything there is to know about me. She’s also a girl. There’s not that gender barrier that is bound to cause crap between us. I can’t imagine, though, any sort of relationship with a man being of any use or worth wasting a minute over if it wasn’t this. Anything else would be something so inferior, something so obviously doomed to fail, something so tremendously less than what it could be. Why would anyone ever settle for that?
I suspect that waiting for this, the ideal of this, is why I’m still alone. I may never get this. Maybe it’s unreasonable. I’m going to keep waiting, though. The alternative, occupying myself with people I know don’t fit the bill just to pass the time, is every bit as grim to me as simply being alone. Therefore, while it’s going to be so hard to watch the rest of the world “bill and coo” this Valentine’s Day, I guess I’ll just turn my head and hope for better in the future. I don’t really know what other option I have.
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