Drama

Here, in no particular order, are some things I always thought I wanted:

• Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex.
• Huge, romantic gestures. 
• Huge, dramatic fights followed by some ridiculous making up including both of the above. 

Needless to say, my adult relationships have all been kind of rocky. 

Someone twice my age? Well, it worked for Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon, why is my life any different? Living half a continent away from one another and communicating mainly by once-a-week letters because our schedules are at odds? It has a faint tang of Jane Austen, does it not? An emotionally abusive genius I can't stand unless I'm wasted? If the waifish Zelda Fitzgerald can do it, why can't I?

Yeah, I know. 

I bought into all of ohmygodtruelovehastobeallconsuming bullshit, the idea that in order for Love To Be Real it had to be Passionate. And I equated Passion with really specific things. Let's get real. I conflated Passion with Sex and Drama. As if eating one another alive was the measure of the seriousness of a relationship. 

We all know how that story ends. Francesca spending eternity in a whirlwind, Cleopatra with an asp at her breast, Catherine locked in her rooms at Thrushcross Grange.

Me, crying in a feminist sex shop in Minneapolis. 

As established, I am a colossal fucking idiot when it comes to relationships. 

Here, in no particular order, are some things I never knew I wanted:

• Texts during the middle of the day simply to ask "How's your day going?" 
• 96 (continuous!) hours in another person's company. 
• A major holiday dinner with a family that isn't related to me. 
• A cat to like me. Well. At least not actively despise me. 
• Flowers. 
• My spare set of keys with someone who would make use of them. 
• The bed to smell like someone else. 
• Sleeping wrapped up in someone's arms. 

These things, these quiet, day-to-day, being an actual part of one another's lives blow my mind almost every day. I am actually amazed by the extent to which I enjoy family dinners, evenings in with the cat, drinking champagne and cheering so loudly during superhero movies that the neighbors start knocking on the living room wall. It feels completely natural in a way I've never experienced before.

I'm astounded by how being a part of someone's life can expose the depth and breadth of their heart, of their capacity to love.

And all of those things, the having-of-the-spare-keys and sleeping-with-his-shirt-under-the-pillow doesn't mean that the other stuff is missing. It turns out your neighbors can hate you because you cheer during Captain America: The Winter Soldier and for the other reasons people hate sharing thin-walled apartments with couples.

Drama, it turns out, is overrated.

Thank God.