spend the rest of my life with Steve Livingston

July 31, 2007 in Acton, Mass. We are now legally married. We have not yet had a ceremony.

We talked and talked and talked about the hard stuff… the stuff you never really want to talk about… perhaps out of fear of rejection… perhaps just fear boiling up from the past. But we talked anyway, and all kinds of surprising things came up. As painful as it was to be so opened with each other, and say the things we dreaded saying and to hear the things we dreaded hearing, we somehow were able to come up with a compromise that we both actually really like. It actually doesn’t seem like a compromise to me because I am getting what I need, and visa versa, plus I don’t feel like I am giving what I don’t want to give either.

Compromise can be a beautiful thing.

It keeps getting better, even through the awfulness. Like a phoenix through the flames… reborn into something even more magnificent!

fear of hell sometimes keeps us from heaven

I keep this ongoing goal/blog for days like these. Days when I really feel that quitting this relationship would be the best course of action for me and my sanity. I keep this running total of words to remember the kindnesses when the kindnesses seem to have run dry, and I feel convinced in my heart and mind that he no longer loves me. Because I feel that today. I feel like he has run out of love for me. I don’t want to say anything to him, because it seems to me that almost every exchange leads to an accusation from him… as if he takes glee in my every mis-step, and EVERYTHING I initiate IS a mis-step, a mis-take. He picks apart HOW I say things, and offers how I SHOULD say things. He makes me feel like I am perceived as an ungrateful, uneducated, graceless, spoiled brat… but not to put words into his mouth of course.

It is the pits. I do not remember the love right now… I don’t feel love from him. I don’t feel like he wants me to feel good about myself anymore. I think he wants me to loath myself as much as he does. He doens’t seem to want to be with me, and is content enough to not connect on any level with me.

I feel very hurt and rejected. I do not know what I did for him to behave in this way? I don’t know why he seems to dislike me so much, and wants me to feel bad. I don’t know where this is coming from. I feel like I am with a stranger, and I don’t like him.

My heart is broken.

Steve has been house-husbanding since he arrive home from his trip to Illinois. Since he was gone for a week, he doesn’t have much work on his bench, so he has been lovingly devoting more time to the garden and the house. He committed a neatness around the oven which kind of defies the imagination. I had no idea that the tiles and the over were actually so WHITE! I cook and do not clean, and it shows. Also, as I have been so busy settling into my new job, Steve has taken to cooking one dinner a week… this is huge in two ways. The first in that I am able to let go of cooking it, and second, in that he is willing to try cooking for the ultimately picky ME. So far so good. I feel lucky, blessed.

Instead of a full week away, Steve came home a day early, and was pulling in the driveway around 11 last night! I was exhausted… which was my plan to exhaust myself with Saturday chores, so that I would sleep. So I might have seemed a little underwhelmed… I didn’t jump all over him. But it was sweet. We went to bed in each other’s arms a awoke that way late in the morning. I made us a nice breakfast of coffee, raspberry danish, cantelope, and mushroom omelette. It has been a good day.

I miss him. I drove home today noticed his car was not in the driveway, and wondered if he was on a service call. Then I remembered he is in Illinois. Only five more days! I feel some discouragement that I’m not even half way yet.

He just left a few minutes ago.

I am so very much in love with this man.

It has been an 18+ year relationship, with the last four becoming romantic… and I just feel so connected with him… not just the small tenuous connection of attraction, but a connection of spirit, and “being” which is so deep, vast, profound. I feel like there is nothing unspoken, nothing hidden from how we are connected.

I have no questions, but always interest.

I enjoy being with him, even if it is to hug him deeply in the dogfood section of Target, while we carelessly block other shoppers from the selection of biscuits.

He is leaving day after tomorrow for Dixon, Illinois to be with his mother while she recovers from surgery. He is a good son.

I am not looking forward to our parting… a long week of parting… and I hope not a moment longer. Every night we stay up a little later in each other’s arms, and every morning we hold each other a little tighter before our morning departures.

Last night we cried a little, and to think it will only be a week! What tender and delicate flowers we are! Scappy survivors to all who see us in the outside world, but what a world of difference in our private lives. We wept and held each other last night, and reminded ourselves about what wet people we are.

Back in the early romance days we clung to each other when we parted. He lived on the westside of town and I downtown… a good fifteen minute drive apart, and back then we would part for days at a time. We used to start to miss each other an hour before “making leaving noises”, and would try to vow not to miss each other before we were actually parted.

For some reason I thought this would fade, and it hasn’t. Why should it? This isn’t a typical love. It isn’t young love. It isn’t magic, as I have said before. We work on it, constantly. He doesn’t know it all, and neither do I. We don’t have all the answers. We quarrel sometimes, we disagree, we have two completely different sets of eyes. We were raised differently. We are not the same person.

And yet, I find it to be constant revelation. Without too much drama we are able to work on this relationship. We are able to focus on those places where we come together without being distracted by the ways we do not.

We have taught each other keep ever mindful we are on the same team. He wants me to succeed in love and I want him to succeed in love. We want the other to win, and not at the expense of ourselves, but in the enrichment of our couplehood.

Perhaps too many words? Ah, who actually reads this? I write it for myself… to remember. Remember this amazing accomplishment I have made with MY STEVE to love unconditionally.

Now if I can just take these six or so people in my life who I love unconditionally and multiply it by a billion… well, then perhaps I can love the world’s human population, and that will knock off another of my life’s goals!

I sure do love this guy.

We are really seriously getting married next year… less than a year away! I am feeling okay about this. I am looking forward to it.

I sure do love this guy.