Truly, Madly, Deeply, Part I: Friday I’m in Love

Hello, all. It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? Three months. Damn. There are cobwebs all over the place, and I’ve never been a good housekeeper.  Hold on a second while I tidy up.  Yes, that lamp goes there and this table needs a good dusting.  There!  I’m ready to post now.  Last thing I wrote about was Minna 4.0 and all the changes she’s gone through. Well, it’s time for another update because Minna 4.0 has gotten a major upgrade–one that I never thought she’d get*.

Remember how I’ve written in the past that while I have started longing for a relationship, I never thought I’d find one?  Of course, that was back in the dark ages (MONTHS ago) when I wondered if I was dating material.  I wanted love, but I was deeply afraid that I wouldn’t find it in this lifetime.  I thought the best thing to do was to go to activities that I would enjoy anyway and see what happened.  I would test the water and see what was out there.  I would take it slow and not expect anything to happen for some time.

At least that was the plan.

Funny how things change in a heartbeat.

A few months ago, I got into an epic word battle with a guy on ABL’s Facebook wall.  He went by the name of Idle Primate, and he knew ABL through a cultural commentary site called Pajamas or something like that**.  I don’t know how the great ate debate started, but it evolved into the two of us exchanging ripostes involving words ending in -ate or derivations of.  We went on for hours.  It was a blast, and I included a song that he immediately claimed.  It’s the first video posted below.

He requested to be friends on the FB, and I accepted.  We started flirting almost immediately after, but I was determined to keep it light because he wasn’t in my city or state.  Hell, he wasn’t in the States at all.  He’s from Ottawa, Canada, and I was determined not to get into another long distance relationship.  Sure, he was intelligent, witty, funny as hell, thoughtful, goofy, creative, poetic, and we clicked right off the bat.  Yes, he was single and not afeeeeered of commitment as my past partners have been.  He was in fucking Canada, and not in Winnipeg or anywhere close-ish.  I was NOT going down that road–uh uh, no sirree.

The internet is a funny thing.  It allows for a connection that isn’t based on physical proximity; indeed, I didn’t even know what he looked like since he only had pictures of apes as his profile pic on FB.  Yes, we were both putting our best feet forward, but the real us still came out loud and strong.  We quickly moved to PM’ing each other, and then I suggested we take it off FB because I don’t trust them at all.  No, I don’t trust Google and gmail much more, but FB really is the nadir of privacy.

I soon grew to anticipate emails from him.  My heart would skip a beat if I had one, and it would thump in disappointment if my inbox was stubbornly empty.  Sure, we bantered on FB, but it wasn’t the same.  Still, I told myself that it was just for fun and that I was just practicing my dating chops since I haven’t used them in a long time.  Honestly, I’ve never really dated as I find the concept an anathema–I tend to plunge right into relationships or flings or whatnot.   I was determined to keep it on a fling-like level because he was so far away and the chances of us meeting were slim.   Months earlier, I had decided that I wasn’t going to be the first one to fly to meet, especially not for a booty call.  I’d done that in the past, and I didn’t want to do it again.

Besides, I was going to find me someone local.  It was my new motto:  Fuck locally.  It’s better for the community and for you.  If Idle Primate wanted to fly to MN for some companionship and some sexxxing, that was fine by me.  However, I was NOT going to get involved with a Canuckistani.  No, no, no.  Not going to happen.  I was firm about this in my mind.

Except, I was starting to have more than warm, “come on, let’s fuck” feelings about him, and I panicked.  I couldn’t fall for someone so far away–I simply couldn’t.  But, I didn’t want to give up the connection we had, so I tried to have it both ways.  I continued flirting with him and exchanging intimacies, but I also encouraged him to date locally.  I wasn’t quite ready to date yet (I was looking more for a fuck buddy), and I didn’t want to be unfair to him since he seemed ready to jump in the dating pool.

He called me on it.  I realized that I was being disingenuous in pushing him towards other women.  You have to understand that I see this now, but it was all a muddle at the time.  I truly did want him to be happy because he’s a good man who deserves happiness with a good woman.  I didn’t think I could be that woman, particularly because of the geographical distance, and it seemed churlish of me to stop him from meeting local women.  What I didn’t acknowledge, though, was that I was quickly becoming attached to this man, and I was ruing the distance between us.  Indeed, I hardly allowed myself to even think about it in the privacy of my own mind, let alone voice it out loud.

We were talking every day through Facebook and email.  Neither of us like the phone, so we stayed away from that for the most part.  We did migrate to IM on Skype, and we both found our comfort zone in that arena.  I found it a lot of fun to post videos on his FB wall (hair bands like Poison and Bon Jovi are a guilty pleasure of mine and a bane of his existence), email him a long, intimate email, and chat with him at the same time.  We could talk about anything, and I felt really simpatico with him. He was making a home in my heart, and it scared the shit out of me.  What do I do when I get scared?  I try to shape the situation into something familiar.  What’s familiar to me?  Sex.  And, we had similar fantasies, though in the opposite.  I may go more into that in a future post, but I’m just going to let you stew on it for now.

I admit it.  I freaked the fuck out.  I had made this big declaration to myself about dating locally and blah-di-blah-blah, and yet, I was falling for a man a thousand miles away.  Again, I am much more clear-eyed about this now than I was then.  Then, I just had to try to turn the situation into something I knew and with which I was comfortable.  So, I gave him the now-infamous (between us) speech about the window of opportunity.  I blush a little to think about it in retrospect, but it’s important in getting us where we are today.

I told him that while I knew we were just flirting and weren’t really thinking of meeting (though we had talked about it in more concrete terms), if we did meet, it had to be soon because the window of opportunity was closing.  He was, rightfully, confused, and asked met to elaborate.  I took a deep breath and gave it my best shot.  I said that I didn’t want to do a long-distance relationship because I’ve done enough of those in my time.  If he wanted to come and hang out and have sex, I’d be down with that.  However, if he wanted to do that, he had to do it soon because the window of opportunity was closing.  I was beginning to care about him too much to keep him in that category, and as I didn’t want a long-distance relationship, there was no reason for us to meet after the window of opportunity closed.

Sounds fucked up, right?  As Idle Primate said to me later, “I was thinking, let me get this straight.  I can meet you and be with you as long as I don’t care about you too much.  If I do care about you too much, though, then we can’t meet.”  I winced to hear him say it so bluntly, but that was the gist of it.  That’s the familiar road for me–being with someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t commit to me.  Being with someone knowing there would be an end to our relationship. Being with someone who wasn’t as into me as I was into that person. Did I like the way those relationships unfurled? No. Was I comfortable in them? Yes. And so, because I’m a control freak and someone who really really really likes her world to be small, I tried to force Idle Primate to walk down that road with me.

Idle Primate was having none of that. He wanted to meet me, yes, but he didn’t understand the artificial constructs I insisted on placing around the meeting. He was quite clear about his feelings for me, and by baldly stating them, I had to confront my twisted logic, my fears about caring too much for him, and I had to figure out what I really wanted from him.

I looked past my fears and my damage and realized that I didn’t want to walk down the same road with this man that I had walked so many times before. Yes, it would be comfortable and easy (in a sense), but it would end up with the same result–me alone with a mess to clean up. In addition, he’d been hurt badly by women in the past, and he was too good a man to mess with like that. I had to make a decision–either we stopped talking sexy-sexy and truly be just friends, or I had to acknowledge that the dreaded window of opportunity had already closed. I was past being able to be casually-involved with Idle Primate, if I ever was able to be in the first place. For all my brash talk and all my flirty ways, when I fall for someone, I fall hard. It’s why I tend not to love–it’s really hard for me to stop loving someone.

I made my decision.  I told him to forget my window of opportunity speech and that I wanted to meet him without restrictions. To my astonishment, I meant it. I wanted to meet this man without trying to push him into a previous paradigm. That freaked me out, too, but in a better way than my previous freak-out.

By the way, Idle Primate had posted three pictures of himself by this time on his FB wall. I like men of all shapes and sizes, but he was definitely my type. 6’2″ tall with a solid frame (I like big men). He had tats, short-cut red hair with matching mustache and beard, gorgeous blue eyes, a sexy smile, and really nice hands.   I was immediately physically attracted to him, which was made all the hotter by the fact that I was immensely attracted to him in other ways as well.

I wanted this man. Badly. I wanted him as more than a fuck buddy or a fling. The feelings I had for him, nearly from the beginning, were foreign to me. When he told me he had bought the tickets to come see me, I was filled with joy, elation, fear, and astonishment. He actually put his money (literally) where his mouth was, and I was moved that he thought enough of me to walk the walk.

I was ecstatic. I was burbling over with a mixture of lust, excitement, jitteriness, fear, rapture, and….love. Ah, yes, the other four-letter word–the one that I had such issues with. I was determined not to say it to Idle Primate because it was too soon and we hadn’t met in person and because because because…I held good to my vow for weeks, and it was pretty impressive how I was able to creatively tell him that I loved him without using the actual phrase, “I love you”. But, I did. I knew I did, and while I wanted to wait until we met in person, I realized that it was folly to keep dancing around it. So, one day after he said it to me, I said it to him, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

As usual, I’m running long. I’m just going to end this post there and leave you hanging for the next post about the actual meet-up. Hopefully, I’ll get to it in less than three months!

 

*That is the extent of the computer metaphor this time around.
**OK, OK, it’s called Pajiba. Sheesh.