My Villain Arc

It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?

I’m throwing this out here now because I’m kind of in a floaty and positive space and it’s also that liminal time of year where my stress levels are hovering in the kind of low range. Sure, I’ve got a bunch of birthdays coming up between now and July, but they don’t really start until next month, so I’ve got January to take a long and deep breath and bask in Things before I dive back into the art of organizing everything.

And the Thing in which I am basking right now is that I have a boyfriend.

This is an unexpected development, because while yes, he is the crush I mentioned a few months ago (it was a really busy end of the year for me, okay), I don’t think I really expected it to develop into anything real. Wanted it to, sure. Every time I talk to him still, I get this dizzying fluffiness about me that I quite enjoy and like to perpetuate. But expected it to? Not even slightly.

I don’t think I’m terribly crush-back-able lately, which I’m well aware will be disputed by both my husband and my boyfriend and like a dozen or so other people reading this like “noooo you are!” but let me enjoy my self esteem dip for a moment. I do think I have at least a little to offer people when they’re interested in me–I think I’m kind of funny, and I can be fun to talk to (even if I talk too much sometimes). I cook awesome brownies, I write very good stuff, I have good taste in humorous shit, and even though I’m not the biggest fan of how my body looks right now, I can admit that I’ve got great tits and eyes and a slammin ass. 

BUT I’m a lot of work is my always caveat. I’m physically disabled to the point of being unable to cook or clean for myself, and a lot of my most basic self care suffers because I’m so tired all the time from trying to point out to my body “we are literally not doing anything, there is no reason for you to be in pain.” I have permanent nerve damage on my left side–and the bullshit from that ranges from “yay additional pain” to “my toes aren’t moving when I tell them to” to this unfortunately placed patch on the inside of my left thigh that’s just completely dead. I can’t feel anything whatsoever there, and let’s just say that this dead patch is in a VERY INCONVENIENT PLACE WHERE SEX IS CONCERNED.

(hey, it’s a villain arc blog, you’re gonna get TMI)

Which is all to say that sex is a toss up as to how much it works for me: is it going to hurt, is it going to feel like a vague nothing on my left side, am I going to get too tired halfway through? And then there’s the day to day: as the Spice Girls said, if you wanna be my lover, you’ve gotta cook for me, clean for me, understand that I don’t have the stamina to do a lot of things that involve a lot of activity these days (can I talk about how salty I am that I fell in love with hiking and then had it unceremoniously torn away from me because fuck that noise), and most of what I’m capable of doing–because I do stuff, just not a lot of it–is administrative in nature. I’ll plan our drive across the country but I can’t really do much in the way of packing for it, you know?

So while I had this huge crush that grew bigger every time I talked to him, I didn’t expect anything whatsoever to come of it. It wasn’t just my shitty self esteem, though that gnawed at me every time I thought about anything happening between us. It was the shitty self esteem, it was not knowing anything about him–not even his name!–just that talking to him felt like flying, that every day we clicked a little more than the day before, that hearing his voice was enough to make me blush like a teenager getting asked out for prom. It was the whole polyamory thing, which is not quite baggage but feels like it–you have to kind of work to find people who are willing to date someone with a husband and kids. He’s known my husband for a good ten years longer than he’s known me, too, which adds to everything, and really, I basically figured I didn’t stand a chance.

And yet here we are, like four or five months later (honestly, it’s been such a crazy end to 2022 that it might as well have been a year) and not only did I stand a chance but there he is and he loves me and I love him and my GOD what even is that? I know a lot of it is the new relationship energy, how giddy I am about the whole thing, but at the same time, I also know that I (a) love fast, (b) love hard, and (c) don’t stop loving. Like if I ever loved you, I still do, even if our lives don’t allow for the same expression of that love they once did.

(which is a sidebar and beside the point)

We work, somehow, despite everything. He’s about eight hours away as the car drives, so the hang out times we have are over Discord calls, about everything from the weather to religion to philosophy to the latest bullshit being pulled with D&D (it’s some pretty shitty bullshit). We make each other smile, which is a nice thing to have these days. He gets along great with my husband, since they’ve known each other for ages, and he gets along great with my kids (who, really, get along great with anyone), and we mostly know that because we had dinner with him while driving back from Florida back in December and the kids just. Latched onto him adoringly. 

And all of that is wonderful, but what keeps hitting me like a pleasant ton of bricks is that he’s asexual. The pressure is off. It’s like… I can be sexual with him, and I have been, and he appreciates it BUT there’s no pressure to be as such. I don’t have to worry that if I’m sitting here, not really feeling myself or wanting to be particularly lewd, that he’ll try and pressure me into that sort of mood or else feel insulted or hurt that I just don’t want to get juicy with him on a given day. Sex is on the table, but less as a physical need and more as an expression of how we feel about each other. And even with that, it’s not necessarily a definitely will happen thing, more of a “let’s see how we feel in the moment” thing. No pressure.

Though, of course, because there is no pressure, GOD I want him. Not always, not as a constant burning, but on the rare occasion that I do get super horny (and it is rare, for reasons I’ve talked about before), my god, even the idea of just kissing him turns me on so absurdly much that it’s baffling. Like I’ve had three kids. I’ve done the sex many times. I’m from the internet and write and read about very strange things in sexy contexts (tentacles, for example, are barely scratching the surface). And yet with him, I don’t need any of that, physically or mentally, to rev my engine. And the more I love him, the more the idea of just being touched by him–even his thumb brushing against my cheek, his hands around my waist, the tenderest of forehead kisses–has me practically crawling the walls.

One of my best friends calls it a sort of Sweet Valley High-Twilight-esque thing, where it’s bizarrely sweet and innocent and wholesome, and while those aren’t necessarily the words I’d use to describe us (I mean, we watch vampire cartoons on date nights, which isn’t exactly wholesome; also neither of us sparkle or go with “the lion fell in love with the lamb” metaphors because yuck), yeah, that kind of sums it up. He makes me happy. I make him happy. And it works, in a weirdly innocent but also not innocent but wholesome sort of way.

My husband is doing great with the whole thing. He’s excited to have a partner in teasing me (which is, at the end of the day, one of a husband’s main duties, to pull his wife’s pigtails until the end of time), and he’s glad that it’s someone he knows, even if the whole thing took him by surprise just as much as it took both of us by surprise. And somehow, some way that I can’t fully explain, it’s all working.

I wish he were closer. I wish airplane tickets were cheaper. I wish vacations were easier to plan, even short ones.

But all of that aside, I’m happy. I’m in love. And it’s weird and staggering, but it’s there, and I’m glad for that.

(and for the record, I do know his name now, and we have met in person, and he is no longer a delightful nebulous concept but someone who is wonderfully, tangibly real, and that is fantastic)