Sassy Black Friend

What does love look like?

For the first half of my 20s my closest friends were a few years older than me. That meant as I started rolling into the end of my 20s, a lot of weddings were happening. For some reason 28030 seems to be the target marriage age for DC do gooders. Now the younger ones are starting to catch up, and another round of weddings has descended. Which is fun, but makes me thoughtful.

Now I have personal and political issues with marriage that make it a rather unlikely prospect for me, and I’m fine with that. But it doesn’t keep me from celebrating the happiness of people I care about and enjoying their open bar receptions.

Last weekend I went to one such event with my uh… boyfriend isn’t the word, but for lack of something better that will do. The history of our relationship is somewhat relevant, so if you want to hear it, I’m including a short-ish version after the jump.

Anyway, the wedding was fun, and after about a bottle of prosecco each the bride and I were having one of those drunk heart to heart conversations. She told me that she didn’t think she’d be able to spend the rest of her life with her brand new husband, but figured she’d give it a shot. Neither is religious and they don’t plan to have kids, so that seemed fine with me. The fact is, marriages end, it’s probably good to be realistic about it going in.

On the way home I was telling Paul about this and he thought it was super weird. It was unusual, but not weird to me. The fact is, love can look different for everyone. What and who we love is different, why can’t how we love be the same? When pressed I’m likely to admit that I love Paul, but I just moved 150 miles away from him, and rarely even describe him as my boyfriend. And the fact is, this is one of the best relationships I’ve ever been in. It works for us. Just like moving in together and being revoltingly cute works for SBF and Dan.

As long as you’re happy and no one is getting hurt, figure out what kind of relationship you want and doyour thing.

As promised, the long saga of Jen and Paul goes a little something like this:

The summer before my sophomore year in college my friend and I met Paul at a club. He’d only been in Dc a few weeks and was really just looking for people to hang out with. He was just finishing a quicky divorce after a quicky marriage, and living in corporate housing in the suburbs. I was working and liing on campus for the summer spending 75% of my small salary on tequila and cab fare. Those were good times.

So, we ended up dating for the summer, and by dating I mean going at it like rabbits (sorry – TMI) for threw months. The summer ended, classes started and things just kind of ended. We kept in touch, but I met someone else soon after and dated that giant loser for 2 years.

Since that summer of 1998 we’ve dated probably 5 or 6 times. Sometimes casually, sometimes not. But always with the same result. Him pressing to know where things are going and me pushing him away because of it. Honestly I thought that would be a life-long pattern until last summer.

We started hanging out and finally found ourselves at the same place at the same time. When I was still in DC we spent time together when we wanted, no pressure. No talk about the future. And when I decided to come back to Philadelphia, that was fine too. His parents are in the area too, so I think I see him more now than when we lived in the same area. And for now it’s working great. That’s what love looks like for me right now. We’ll see where things go.