If it is not already apparent from my previous posts, my mother has influenced my perception on love and relationships. While growing up, she opened my head and poured in all of the emotions and opinions that come from being in an unhappy marriage.
Love does not exist.
Men only make women slaves.
If you ever end of pregnant, I’ll kill you.
She is bored and aggrieved by her current husband, hating that they do not have the same interests or outlooks on life, wishing she married a dancer like she always wanted. She told me once that she let the perfect one get away…and now she’s stuck with the one she’s got, because she has no financial independence and no confidence to get herself out.
This is…scarring for a little girl. In one respect, it’s a positive thing that I was pushed to be self-sufficient. I was going to make my own money. I would not settle for being a housewife. I knew from a young age that a lot of men only want to get their dick wet; don’t believe that they love you just because they want your body.
Yet, it also set up a life of loneliness; if the only one you can trust is yourself, how do you open up to a partner? How do you not feel guilty and dirty and weak when falling in love? How do you live with these two parts within yourself, one telling you that being alone is paramount, while the other is singing that partnership is natural and needed?
When I finally started to date my first serious boyfriend (which happens to be my current), I went through several panic attacks. My brain kept urging me that this was a waste of time, that this was not a game meant for me to play. Yet, this was the person that I tried to not fall in love with, whom I only wanted to remain friends, and my heart couldn’t settle for that.
He is too good of a person, too much of a brilliant mind and gentle soul to not want to try something more. He is kind, honest, and honorable. He is everything that my mother said that a man could not be.
Albeit, he doesn’t dance. Even in the quiet, even when we are alone, even if the song is slow, he won’t dance when a good song comes on like I do.
But I didn’t want a dancer. While I never made a mental list of what I wanted because the concept was so discouraged, he seems to fit whatever fantasy that I could have made. Perhaps we are the partners that I looked up to as a child.
The Spock to my Kirk.
The Mulder to my Scully.
The person who is steadfast and true and will be there when it’s dirty and ugly and ostensibly hopeless; that’s what we are to each other.
Fuck slow dancing. We are adventurers in this big, scary world, and the journey is better with someone I love at my side, to fight the demons together.
Collective Cogitations 
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