I have a boyfriend. Over the past few months, I have been trying very hard to keep the details of my romantic life off the Internet. This was for my own sanity and also because the universe is designed such that if you write even a marginally successful blog and you date a man and that man has an ex who is even the tiniest bit insecure, SHE WILL FIND YOU AND WHEN SHE DOES SHE WILL BE ANGRY. You do not have to mention his name. You do not have to run a photo of him. You do not have to do anything more than provide the most basic details about him to the Internet public, and suddenly, halfway across the world, an alarm begins blaring in this woman’s head, and her vision is colored red, and she doesn’t know why but she finds herself walking, zombie-style, to a computer and typing in this blog’s address and reading, like, all three years of the archives and then sending me an angry message informing me of the all-around horrible nature of the man I am currently dating (because she is always helpful and big-hearted like that) and also of my own fatness (because I am fat, ‘natch). I don’t respond. And then she does it again. And again. And again. Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned. I have now been through this process more times than I would like to count. I wanted to keep this one safe.
FAIL.
It worked for awhile and then she found me. I don’t know how. I mean, I can never figure out how. (If you’re reading this, dear, could you please explain in your next vicious diatribe opus exactly how you tracked me down in the first place? I’d like to know, just for future reference.)
But I guess the signs have been there for awhile, and I’ve had enough people email me or post comments like, “Wait, do you a boyfriend?” and so, like, yeah, I have a boyfriend. I was definitely not looking for a boyfriend, and I definitely did not expect it to be him. (I was convinced for awhile that he had absolutely zero romantic interest in me.) But I’m the happiest I’ve been in a really long time. It’s weird — I finally sat down and dealt with a lot of the emotional baggage I carried around from past relationships with men. I had a relationship (one that I didn’t talk about at all on here) end really horribly, and I realized, finally, that I was largely to blame. I didn’t cheat on him or punch him in the nuts or anything, but I’d just really sucked at it. He was great and I totally fucked it up by being an insecure shithead who always finds a way to fuck up relationships because actual healthy romantic commitments terrify me. I lost a lot of sleep over that one, and I decided I was going to do whatever it took to not suck so bad at relationships. I was tired of putting myself through this, and I was tired of putting other people through this.
So I wrote about it and I talked to friends about it and I spent a lot of time looking at my part in why my past relationships had failed so miserably. I stopped blaming everyone else and I looked at what was my fault and I looked for the destructive patterns in my behavior and I made apologies where they were necessary (and I had a delightfully surprising number of men graciously accept — as much as I suck at relationships, I have stumbled across some pretty fantastic and loving men to be in them with me) and I resolved to be very conscious of these patterns and work hard to not repeat them. When I did that, this wonderful man, who had been a valued friend before, suddenly turned into a romantic partner. And I realized that he was kind and honest and loyal and totally capable of being in a healthy adult relationship, and, suddenly, so was I. The universe is a magical teaching tool, and I am grateful to be capable of learning from it. Life is good right now.
