After 15 Years I Didn’t Expect To Fall For Him

What started out as casual sex led to the healthiest relationship of my life and it’s scary as hell

Photo by Kadarius Seegars on Unsplash

He was on the bed and I sat in his desk chair. We were mostly sober, we’d had something like one drink apiece, but were giddy as if we’d taken an edible. He looked so happy. It had been a fun night but it was time to rip the band-aid off.

Just do it! I repeated to myself a few times, trying to give myself the nudge I needed to have the talk. It was then at that moment that I realized that butterflies didn’t have to be confined to the stomach. I felt them everywhere.

Deep breath in… and exhale.

It was now or never. “Let me ask you a question. What are we?”

Early on in life, my mother gave me some sort of talk about men. The gist of the conversation was that men only wanted one thing and that once they got it they would leave me. Basically don’t have sex until you’re married.

When I was a preteen my cousin married his long-term girlfriend not because he wanted to but because he felt pressured to do it. She moved in with our huge extended family — me, my mom, my grandmother, my two aunts, my cousin and his young son. To me, she was like a big sister. I thought she was so cool. But their relationship was clearly toxic. They argued a lot and seemed generally unhappy most of the time.

Most of the romantic relationships I witnessed in real life were either non-existent or toxic as hell. When I say non-existent, I mean my mother and all my aunts were either divorced or never married. Part of me always believed I would probably follow the same path and as I got into one failed relationship after another it started to feel even more like the truth.

I spent my 20s dating mostly men who wanted something from me. Most of the time it was as my mother had predicted, they wanted sex but in the case of my last ex, he was using me financially. He was unemployed for most of our relationship and I paid for everything. I entered into that relationship because he was there and I was lonely, but it wasn’t healthy and I definitely wasn’t happy. I ended that relationship a week before my 30th birthday because I didn’t want to…