begin with the beginning

For someone who's never been in a relationship, I've certainly had a lot of opinions about them. I've given my friends tons of advice about them over the years and then, as I started dating and getting within sniffing distance of the real thing, I started opining about how they didn't have to be the center of one's life etc. etc. And I still believe all of that.

But things feel different on the other side. I have a boyfriend now (yes, folks, in case you haven't heard it in person, it's "Sammy") and I must admit that there's a hell of a lot of difference between a "boyfriend" and "this guy I'm dating." This is one matter that I will not claim to be an expert on, having only experienced boyfriendhood for slightly more than a week. The difference so far is not in what we do or how often we do it (there were times when I was seeing guys I was dating more frequently than I'm seeing Sammy; because of our schedules, he and I are lucky if we see each other twice in a week).

I guess the difference starts with the mutual declaration, the admission really, that this is what you both want. In the past, it was always me who wanted this or that person to be my boyfriend, while their wants always remained elusive. There was a gulf of silence between me and those other boys, the gulf of my longing to have something from them and their witholding it from me.

For approximately three weeks, though, it's been clear that S and I didn't operate by those rules. Where silence reigned with other boys, with us it was all talking, telling one another way too many things about how we were feeling towards one another. And when the word "boyfriend" finally broke the nighttime silence (that word that I've thought about and typed so many times but rarely spoken with any kind of personal relation to its meaning), it felt exciting and surprisingly unfamiliar.

I wasn't prepared for how long it would take me to adjust to the new nomenclature. Surely, it was just a word to describe something that had been going on for a while already: we'd been spending more time with one another, becoming intimate, enjoying one another's company, sharing things. All of that felt natural. And yet, when it came time to declare a new state of being, a start to something, I who'd been longing to do just that for so long was unprepared for how that rupture, that starting point, would feel.

Looking at my altered Friendster profile (which, of course, brought S and me together in the first place), I felt like I was looking at a different person: no longer "Dating Men, Relationship Men" but "In a Relationship." That preposition makes all the difference. It's not the warm, fuzzy feeling of a prospective, theoretical relationship we're talking about but a real (and really specific) one. Here was this online profile that I'd spent nights tweaking (perhaps most significantly on the night when I kept all the text the same but removed all capitalization!) in an attempt to both capture my essential nature and make myself seem enticing, to present myself on the marketplace and arouse interest. The profile began as an advertisement and here I was declaring that the sale was over.

It can feel arbitrary to pinpoint the start of something. The night I changed my Friendster profile felt important because the word was finally there in black and white. But I'm starting to think that any relationship worth being in keeps starting all the time. Even in the brief week that it's been "official," I feel as if the relationship has started numerous times, each time in a different way. It almost ended, too.

Without getting into all the details, I stupidly behaved in a way that was totally opposed to the special openness and honesty that S and I have between us. Ironically, it happened on the very night we first used the word "boyfriend"; honest as I acted like I was being, there was something I didn't tell him. We've been dealing with it the past couple of days and I think it's going to be OK. The experience only made me value more what is developing between us and it made me grateful that I still have a chance to work on it.

Maybe anything that endures always begins in difficulty, even if we thought it started well before. It's only in difficulty that you know if it's substantial. When I was first getting to know S, he joked with me about the name of the color he'd chosen to paint the walls of his room: "Endurance." That was a long time ago -- he and I know each other a lot better now, and yet we still don't know each other well at all.

Anything good keeps starting again and again. It's always new. In a sense, my relationship began again in a new way when I told S about this blog (anybody that I'm close to ought to know about it, I thought). And this blog starts anew by me bringing him into it. You may or may not hear much about him in the future, I don't know. I don't know how inclined I'll feel to set down the details of our relationship here. But I thought you all ought to know that it's official -- and getting more official every day.