I have been An Unmarried Woman (so speaketh my mortgage documents) for eight years now, pretty much to the day. Over the course of those years, I have been on twenty thousand (approx) dates, most of them atrocious. I’ve had a few short-term relationships — a month, maybe three or four — but I’m now in one that’s going on two years. Which is wild, if you ask me, mostly because I no longer appear to be the same relationship-requiring human being that I was when this whole process began.
It’s not that I’m not enjoying my relationship, or that it’s not a positive thing in my life; I am, and it is. It’s just that the absolute need to find a partner that I felt so acutely for the entirety of my adult life has simply disappeared.
I know now that I’ll be happy if this relationship continues, because being in it will be a choice I make, not something I require in order to feel whole. I will also be okay if it ends, because my safety does not and never again will depend on the presence or absence in my life of a man. Put it on my headstone.
When people ask me how it’s “going,” I tell them it’s great. Then, of course, they ask, “So are you planning to move in together? Or get married?” to which I shrug my shoulders. This nearly always elicits the “oh, dear” look. (It must not be going that well after all, the look says.)
I don’t care.
I see divorced friends of mine getting remarried and blending families and I am so happy for them. I also don’t understand what something like that would look like for us, and until that’s a thing I can understand and actively wish for, it’s a thing that is not going to happen.
I’m also not super concerned about that fact.
Like I said: WILD.
When my partner and I had been dating just a couple of months, due to various circumstantial events and my own tendency to rush into everything, always, all of the time, we considered moving in together. I told my therapist about this, and she, for lack of a better phrase, bugged out.
Absolutely fucking not, under no circumstances, she told me.
And in a whiplash of a move from what I’d usually do…I listened to her.
We still do not live together.
