Dating Diary: Just Friends

As soon as class guy walked into his first class a few minutes late I was hooked. This guy was sexy, with a great body and beautiful hair and skin. Once I got to know him a little more I was all in. He was only 20, so about ten years younger than me (which made me feel like a bit of a cradle robber) but in every other way he seemed perfect. He was funny, highly intelligent, and a gentleman. He had a good job and home, great friends, and a sense of style. We started hanging out outside of class and it seemed like he liked the same music and food as me. Things were going somewhere.

But as things progressed, I started sleeping over at his house a lot and we still didn’t do the deed. I started wondering if there was something wrong. Finally, on one of my visits, we tried. And I have to say that either the guy had a problem getting up or he was on roids or something, because it didn’t go well. I wondered if maybe he just wasn’t attracted to me.

We stayed up late that night and the next day I was working a double shift at work and his friend was coming from out of town to visit him. Since we were both busy, we didn’t talk – which is fine. I don’t necessarily need to talk to a guy I’m seeing casually every day. (But at the same time, when he didn’t call me I felt like he wasn’t that into me; it would have been nice for him to let me know he had a great time.) By the following day I had decided that I didn’t want to sleep with him again, so I would just call him and say that I just wanted to be friends. 

But I was awkward about the sexual problems and I didn’t want to bring them up, so I came up with what I thought was a smooth way to wriggle out of it. I figured I’d use him not calling the next day as an excuse. In the end, it was a stupid decision – it just made me look crazy. He wasn’t even mad about being just friends, but he kept trying to explain why he was too busy to call. The thing was, I didn’t actually care, so I told him not to worry about it – we’d just hang out next time we saw each other in class. The class rolled around, and we left together as usual. As we were walking, he turned to me.

“I just wanted to explain why I didn’t call. I knew you were working all day, and I was going to that show with my friend. I knew we’d talk to each other again…”

“Look,” I finally said. “That wasn’t the real reason. I don’t really care if a guy calls me the next day. The reason I told you that is because I didn’t enjoy the sex the other night.”

“Oh,” he said.

“So, just friends?”

“Just friends, okay.”

He didn’t ask any more questions and we went our separate ways. A few days later, I started wondering if I’d made a mistake. The guy seemed perfect in every way except in the sack. I messaged him saying I wanted to give it one more shot. Maybe our problems that first night had been a one-off, and there was more to him than that. He said he wasn’t really interested, that he’d moved onto seeing other people. I told him so had I, and we left it at that.

The most awkward thing was seeing him in class afterwards. We totally stopped hanging out as friends and for a while he avoided me like the plague. It made class super weird and made me realize why they say it’s not a good idea to hook up with anyone you’ll have to see every day afterwards if it fucks up. The weirdest thing of all is that after the class ended he started texting me looking for a quick fuck. I kept turning him down, but he kept asking even as I went through other boyfriends and changed phone numbers. Finally I told him I was pregnant and he backed off.

I don’t know what the lesson is here – maybe it’s to be careful what you ask for. Just because someone seems great at first doesn't mean they're right for you.

Working The Long Game

I’ve always wanted to write books. At some point in the last few years I came across a scrap paper that I must have filled out when I was about 6 years old. Under the category asking what job I wanted to do, I put something like, “firefighter or author.” I honestly have no idea where I came up with the idea that I wanted to be a firefighter (is that just a universal little kid thing?), but I definitely knew all along that I wanted to be a writer. As a kid, my nose was always buried in a book. Some of them were literary books passed down from my university-educated parents, but a lot of them weren’t. They were Scholastic books, adventurous stories about kids like The Boxcar Children, The Hardy Boys, and later the Animorphs. Basically, it was all serialized fiction which eschewed the literary bent for adventure and simplicity. Later, in university, when I found myself trying to be super-literary, I had to remind myself that my formative years were spent reading a lot of pulp fantasy and mystery, and not the (capital-C) Classics.

My first attempt to write a book came when I was about 10. I wrote about 30 pages of a crime thriller about a little kid and his friend who were somehow tasked with investigating a mysterious accident. It didn’t get very far – at some point I think I realized that I didn’t really have any idea what the kids were going to find, and the story was quickly abandoned. That pattern followed through much of high school, as time and time again I would start a story only to leave it abandoned after a chapter or two. Usually there was some sense that I’d run out of ideas and didn’t know how to drive the story to a sweeping conclusion, but I also had a tendency to agonize over the sections that were already written and either compulsively edit them or just give up, feeling like they exemplified my failure as a writer. I felt incapable of finishing anything. In the end, I would get stuck and move onto a new idea that seemed more tantalizing.

Follow-through is really important in being successful in any aspect of life. One of the first things one of my teachers preached in writing school was to work on finishing things, because history is littered with writers swimming in half-finished manuscripts who never went anywhere. I’ve gotten a bit better at completing projects since university, but not much – I’m still very much a work in progress, and stories without deadlines tend to hang in eternal limbo. It‘s with this history firmly in my mind that in the past few months I’ve been forced to set this project – at least the nitty-gritty work of writing and editing – a little bit to the side. This time, it wasn’t simply out of a loss of interest or feeling stuck. I felt like I was absolutely capable of continuing to work on the book and between Sarah’s original manuscript and my detailed notes, I have a very strong notion on how to complete the book. But I also knew that if we were going to sell this story to editors and publishers, they needed to know that we were capable writers. They needed to know that putting a book in our hands was the responsible thing to do. So I put the manuscript aside and set out to, in so many words, make a name for myself. While I knew that I had to keep my expectations in check and not expect to get big-time gigs immediately, I also knew my portfolio lacked the punch to get noticed in a slush pile and that any decent credentials would be better than what I had. If getting a book published is the end goal, getting a shorter article published in a mid-level magazine is a means to that end. It’s been a moderate success so far. While nothing I’ve written has made me an overnight success, my name is significantly more Googleable than it used to be and I’ve had a few articles that have seen widespread circulation or received some outside praise.

The other day, for the first time in my life, I pitched two major magazines with a story I’ve been independently researching. In response, I received two generally complimentary rejection emails. The first email was from an editor I have worked with before who suggested that the story was interesting, but not newsworthy enough for his publication. The other editor thanked me for the pitch but stated that the story was “not quite right at this time.” In my reading up on how to get published in the magazine industry, I have come under the impression that “not quite right at this time” often means that the story pitched was too big for the writer’s credentials – that it may have been a workable story but not one that an editor was willing to trust in the hands of an unknown. I have no idea if that was the true underpinning of my response note – perhaps there was another reason, or several, why it didn’t fit into their criteria for publication – but it seems like an entirely reasonable read on the situation. The article I was (and still am) hoping to write is a long-form piece, but it’s a long-form piece that might top out at a couple thousand words. Sleeping With The Material World is a long-form piece that will be running 100,000 words – and as such, an editor is going to need that much more faith in the writer handling the project.

Writing is hard. The more research I do, the more articles I come up with that are just disgruntled writers writing about writing, or preachy articles about how to get stuff rejected. More and more, it seems there are more people writing stuff than reading it, which is kind of a sad reality of our modern world. Between writing, working at my full-time job, and having Netflix readily available, I’m almost embarrassed to admit how many books I read these days – and that’s as a writer! I certainly make the effort to always be working on a novel, but there are certainly weeks where I barely read anything offline. But that's not the point. Really, being a productive writer is about pitching and getting work done. Reading is intellectually stimulating and important on various levels, but ultimately unproductive.

Of course, while I’m over here trying to get some smaller work published, the Sleeping With The Material World manuscript sits idly by, not getting nearly as much work or love as it should. Between Sarah’s pregnancy and my writing work elsewhere, along with both of us having full-time jobs to pay the bills, it’s become a little like an older brother who feels neglected because the new baby has everyone’s attention. And honestly, we haven’t had as much time to work on the manuscript in the last few months as we would like. But it’s not abandonment, at least not in the way I used to abandon my stories. It’s about working the long game.

-Simon

Exercising With Other Moms-To-Be

When I got pregnant, I was doing a martial arts class a couple of times a week and working out on top of that. My class was in Jeet Kune Do, a type of martial arts which involves a lot of takedowns, kicks, punches, and sometimes sticks and knives. I would often come home with bruises on my legs and arms. So when I got pregnant, my OB told me I couldn’t do Jeet Kune Do anymore, because the contact was risky for the baby. Around the time I stopped, I generally became extremely tired and seemingly lost all motivation to work out. I was working a lot of hours at work and I was just blah. I began to fall into a rut where I wasn’t participating in any physical activity at all.

The fact that my partner could still go to class and I couldn’t grated on me. I started to get depressed, and jealousy and hormones took over. I realized that I needed to be doing something – just lying at home feeling pathetic wasn’t my thing. One of my pregnant girlfriends told me she was doing Aquafit and I was welcome to join her for a class. I wasn’t convinced at first, but I figured I’d try one class and see what it was all about.

The first half hour of my first class was just a discussion about pregnancy and after-birth topics, and I learned a lot about what to think about when a baby is coming into your life. After the talk we all headed downstairs to the pool and spent an hour doing some exercises. Afterwards, I felt relieved and like I’d accomplished something. Because the whole class was geared towards pregnancy and after birth, I learned a lot. Being around other pregnant women who could understand what I was going through was such a nice change from my everyday life, and pretty soon I was a regular at the class.

Of course, as my body grew, my two-piece bathing suit kept shrinking. Fortunately, I’m small enough that I didn’t grow out of it entirely, It just started to look a little weird – I didn’t have to go out and buy a pregnancy bathing suit (maternity clothes are expensive!).

Whether it’s Aquafit or something slightly different, I’d recommend some kind of communal exercise like this to all moms-to-be. There are lots of reasons for that, but here are just a few:

1. It’s nice to be around other women experiencing the same thing as you 
2. You can make friends 
3. It’s good for you physically 
4. It’s good for you mentally
5. Learning how other moms-to-be are planning ahead can help you make your own choices when it comes to the baby 
6. It’s a refreshing break from work and home life 
7. It’s a time to spend bonding with the baby, even though it’s still growing inside of you 

Being pregnant slows you down a lot – you’re literally carrying around a huge weight inside of you, after all. But while that may be an easy excuse to do nothing, that doesn’t mean that it’s healthy to just lie around the house. Staying physically active is important for a pregnant body.

Dating Diary: A Foot Fetish?

I’d been casually acquainted with this fellow model at my agency for a few years. The first time we had met was at a Mac Body Painting show where we got to see each other naked. I liked what I saw and I guess he did too, but nothing came of it because he hooked up with one of the makeup artists after the show and I left. Years went by and we ran into each other at a few castings. We would talk here and there but I always thought he was a bit of a mimbo (male bimbo), so I wasn’t really interested. Besides, the only model I ended up dating in all my years in the industry turned out to be gay, which kind of turned me off the idea of dating the male talent in general.

But eventually this mimbo and I ended up doing a casting for an alcohol commercial where we played boyfriend and girlfriend. At the time I was newly single and had just moved back to Toronto, and after the casting we started talking about religion and astrology and for the first time in all my years of rubbing shoulders with this guy I thought that maybe there was more to him than just looks. I gave him my number and he walked me to the streetcar stop. We stood there talking for about an hour as streetcar after streetcar passed me by. It was like I couldn’t tear myself away. Finally I told him I had to go because I was going to be late for work. He gave me a hug and kissed me on the cheek. I was a little shocked.

“Thank you?” I said. Then I hopped on the streetcar.

I was busy for a few days, but we eventually made plans for the following Sunday. Every time I had seen him up to this point was at a casting, so I was familiar with his clean-cut photo-ready look, but on Sunday I was a bit shocked to find out what he looked like in real life – unshaven, with clothing that was a little bit dishevelled and long, dirty fingernails. (I can’t stand dirty fingernails.) He came to my area in Etobicoke and we went to an Italian bakery for lunch, then walked down to the water. He showed me some Tai Chi and I showed him the Kabuki movements I was learning in an acting class. Despite his appearance, I was having a really good time and we ended up going for some Thai food where he made me laugh super awkwardly by singing to me in the restaurant. Mostly it was goofy and fun and romantic, and I didn’t want the fun to stop. After dinner it was getting dark so I asked if he wanted to come over and watch a movie or something. Inside, we talked for a little while and then he asked if he could see my feet.

“No, why?” I said. “Do you have a foot fetish?”

“What if I do?”

I was a little surprised, but at this point I needed to know more.

“What do you do, like, suck on toes and stuff?”

“Yeah, among other things. Let me see them.”

I told him I wasn’t interested because I wasn’t into that. As we continued to talk, a few other things about him came out. He was thirty years old and still lived with his Mom, a pothead, and pretty into the Bible. He still went to church every Sunday and he wanted me to believe too. I don't know how I feel about religion, but I'm certainly not that committed.

I had a lesbian love scene I was working on for my acting class where I had to kiss the other girl at the end. I asked this guy to help me rehearse the scene, but I warned him from the top that I didn’t want to act the kiss out. I just wanted to practice my lines. We ran it through a few times without the kiss, but on the fourth go-round he came over and kissed me. He had great lips, even though they smelled like roast beef and cigarettes, and after we kissed I found I couldn’t focus on the scene anymore. I hadn’t been touched by a man in about four months and I knew I wanted more. We sat there awkwardly for a few minutes, and then I stood up and said I had to run an errand. As I walked towards the door, our eyes locked and suddenly we were kissing again, more intensely than before. Soon our bodies were all twisted together, my legs wrapped around his torso, but then I realized I didn’t want to go any further. We stopped, and I appreciated that he didn’t push the issue.

After he left, I thought about things and decided he wasn’t for me. I was probably just a bit desperate because I hadn’t hooked up with anyone in a long time. In the end, the foot fetish thing was too weird, and I didn’t want a relationship with a grubby pothead who still lived with his Mom. But we’re still Facebook friends and I wish him the best in finding a girl who is also into foot fetishes.

Dating Diary: Norton the Non-Communicator

It started on OkCupid. I matched with a guy who I’ll refer to as Norton, because he vaguely reminded me of Edward Norton. He seemed strange, mysterious, sexy, and intelligent, plus he was Irish. I have Irish heritage, so I’m always drawn to the Irishmen. After some back and forth on the site over a few weeks, I finally gave him my number and we planned to go out on two dates.

At the time I was dealing with some private family stress, and as I was struggling with that, I got sick. The stress brought it on. I had a serious infection and ended up spending some time in the hospital. I was completely out of commission for a week. Once I recovered from the infection, I got sick for another two weeks, and then I discovered I needed to get my wisdom teeth removed. After a month straight of being laid up in bed, this guy Norton was the last thing on my mind, but we kept chatting through the app as I recovered. I felt like through the sickness I was releasing all of the toxins – all of my negativity that had built up over time. It was awful, but it was also cleansing.

I wound up cancelling both of our original dates. Norton said he wasn’t going to ask me out again because a) I kept cancelling and b) I looked like a snob in my profile pic. (I don’t think I’m a snob!) I felt bad so I invited him out the following Saturday. We met at a French place I knew that had a broad menu and was kind of a bar – it was a good spot because we couldn’t decide if we were meeting for drinks, apps, or dinner. I wasn’t hungry so I ordered a fruit salad and a drink, and he ordered a huge piece of meat. (I was worried that he would think I’m one of those girls who doesn’t eat because of how thin I am. But really I just wasn’t hungry.)

The conversation went well – he gradually progressed from being a bit standoffish to opening up and telling me some things about himself. (Must have been the alcohol.) He told me his roommate was moving out. The night went great and we ended up back at his place. I told him casually during the course of our conversation that I was interested in going on a trip to the state of Goa. Later in the evening he flat-out stated that I was going to move in with him and then he was going to come with me to Goa. I told him he was nuts to say that on a first date, but at the same time I was tickled that he’d suggested it. It made me think that he really liked me. We didn’t end up sleeping together – he was too drunk – but I left his place at five in the morning feeling like things had gone really well.

I was busy with work the next day but we ended up on meeting on Monday. I went over to his place and we watched a few episodes of Sherlock. He lived near my work in the downtown core, and it was easier to go to his house than to go home or invite him over. Then on Tuesday we went out again. We had a drink on a beautiful rooftop patio and then went to a movie where I discovered he had a weird thing for Rachel McAdams. He told me that they worked out at the same gym, had had a couple of conversations, and that she even hired him to clean her basement once. The whole thing seemed kind of weird – people get really weird about celebrities. His obsession with Rachel McAdams should have been a bit of a red flag.

We had lunch again on Wednesday before I went to work, but then I started to notice something weird about the way that he was texting me. It was like he didn’t want to keep seeing me, but was texting me just for fun. We would talk back and forth throughout the day, but he didn’t answer my texts when I got off work. When I told him that, he denied it. He said he was already asleep by the time I finished up at work.

I invited him to a keg party on Friday. One of my girlfriends was throwing it for her brother who was going to be leaving to go touring across Canada and I wanted to bring Norton as my date. Before the party we went for Italian food and I made it clear that I was still talking to other guys because we weren’t official or anything yet. He didn’t like that and said he was jealous. At some point he admitted that he’d only had one serious relationship in the past. He seemed to be a little bit off in the way he thought about things, like he wasn't totally there. I think looking back that maybe he had Aspergers’ or something.

I think he enjoyed himself at the party, but it was a bit weird for me to be going to a kegger. I hadn’t been to one in years, I walked Norton home and took a cab back to my place. I was a bit annoyed that he had never attempted to venture into the west end where I lived. The next day we were planning our first official sleepover, and he made a big deal about popcorn. He said he had to get some and then asked me if I had any. When I got to his place he had to run out and buy some because neither of us had any popcorn. It was totally ridiculous. Then he promised me breakfast in the morning.

We didn’t do it that night – it was my time of the month and I didn’t want to do anything. The next morning I woke up before he did and asked him if he had any tea. He said he didn’t. I told him I had to go, and he walked me to the bus stop. I still hadn’t eaten anything and now I had no time to eat any breakfast, so I just grabbed some shitty Starbucks on the way to work. It wasn’t great.

I texted him a few times over the next couple of days, but our schedules didn’t line up so we didn’t see each other. On the following Monday I had my surgery for my wisdom teeth, and Norton asked if I wanted him to come over on Monday night for emotional support. I knew I was going to need some help, but my Mom was coming over to take care of me so I told him I’d be fine. I didn’t want him to see me all drugged up and swollen. The surgery was very unpleasant and my mouth bled for about three days afterwards. It’s not an experience I would recommend to anyone. As I lay in bed recovering, with my Mom taking care of me, I got all sorts of messages from friends and other guys who were flirting with me, all wishing me well. But nothing from Norton. Finally I messaged him to ask how his day was going. I was upset – I had thought he really liked me.

This is the reason you're single and why you've only had one serious relationship, I told him.

I said that I wanted to be with someone who showed me he could fit me into his life, not one that just says he wants me in his life. It takes effort to make a relationship work – a guy has to cater to a girls’ needs sometimes. He told me he had been golfing all day and went to dinner afterwards with work friends and was too busy to text me. It didn’t seem good enough. I was done with him.

It was a good-bye fight, an I’m-going-to-move-on-with-my-life fight, but that wasn’t quite the end of Norton. In the end he won me back and we started dating for real. I even moved in with him for a few months. But after a while, the Aspergers and the inability to communicate just got to be too much. I broke it off with him and found my own condo downtown.

Dating Diary: The Perfect Pickup Goes Sideways

This was probably one of my weirdest pickups ever.

The story starts by me taking a Thursday mid-shift. Normally I worked nights, but on this day I swapped it for a shift that ended at 9 PM, which worked out perfectly because I wanted to go to a Second City party that night (I was taking improv classes there). Once I finished up at work I headed straight to Second City, sat down at the last remaining seat at the packed bar and ordered a drink called a Moscow Mule (a vodka and ginger beer cocktail). The Moscow Mule is my favourite drink – if I had a choice, I’d never drink anything else. I hadn’t seen anyone from the party yet, but I thought maybe I was a bit early. I texted my friend and found out that I’d gotten the date wrong – the party was the following Thursday. 

I thought: well I have NOT EVER drank in a bar by myself, but since I already ordered my drink I might as well finish it. As I sipped it, two separate guys came over and tried to hit on me. I basically shooed them off. After the second guy left, the guy sitting next to me eating and watching the baseball game turned to me and said, “I’ve counted two so far.”

“What?”

"Two guys trying to pick you up in the first ten minutes since you sat down - that's pretty good."

He was tall, maybe 200 pounds, with curly dark hair, a nice smile and steel blue eyes, and dressed in a suit. He ordered a Moscow Mule - my drink - and started chatting with me. Apparently he had just gotten off work and lived across the street. He was a designer, and just so cute and smart and funny. He seemed a little insecure, which just made him seem available. It seemed like we liked a lot of the same things. In the back of my mind, I was thinking, this guy is so perfect it’s cray. He told me he had squash in the morning and then he said he should make sure to grab my number before he forgot. Once we traded digits, it was like bang. The Jays game ended and he quickly downed his drink, paid for both bills and ran off. I was left sitting by myself at the bar, thinking what the fuck just happened?

I wasn’t planning to text him the next day. Like, who knows what that was? But at some point in the afternoon he texted asking if I wanted to grab a drink on Friday night. I had to work but I agreed to meet him afterwards. So at midnight on Friday he picked me up in an Uber and took me to a bar that had live music. He told me it was his favourite spot. I had to pay for the drinks because he wasn’t carrying cash on him. (Totally fine.) Then we went to a super-nice bar where we sat and gabbed till close and he covered the bill.

We went back to his place. It was sort of empty - not a lot of furniture in the living area. Definitely a guy's place. He offered me a joint. I turned it down but hung with him on the balcony while he toked. He was playing all sorts of music and it was all the same things I loved. It all felt so comfortable. We watched videos, listened to music that moved our souls, and just sat together. Eventually he asked me if I wanted to watch a movie with him in bed and I said yes. After we turned it on we starting making out. Everything was going great, but at some point I had to pump the brakes. I realized I wasn’t ready to sleep over or sleep with him yet. I told him I had to go. He didn't seem super thrilled about it, but he walked me to the door. As he showed me out, I got a bit of a rude, sarcastic vibe from him. He sort of half-jokingly shoved me out of his apartment at the last minute. It seemed weird at the time but I didn't think too much of it.

The next day I texted him and he asked me when I was done work because we had to finish watching the movie. I told him, and again he came to pick me up in an Uber. We went back to his place and chilled again. He got stoned again and I just hung out as he showed me some of his artwork and some various videos online. I don’t think we actually watched the movie we’d started the night before. I went up to his bed again, but it was late and we were both tired so nothing happened between us. As I lay there, he wrapped himself around me like he had to hold me tight. He was like a bear protecting me. I couldn’t leave the bed. He rained light kisses on my neck and the whole experience was just so sweet and charming.

The next morning shortly after I woke up I had to leave for class. He was still wrapped up around me and asked me to stay a little longer. We started chatting, and then he said if we didn’t have sex now it would never happen. I thought he was joking. I had to get to class. I got up, kissed him on the forehead and teasingly said, “then it’s never, my friend.”

As I was leaving, I called up “bye” from the main floor and got back a gruff response like, “yeah, we’ll talk later.” It seemed weird but I shrugged it off at the time. Later in the day I texted him with a joke I thought was funny. He didn’t respond. I waited for a while and just…nothing. He was gonzo - a ghost.

I was left wondering what I'd done wrong. I felt like I was terrible at dating. Was he really just after one thing all along? Our two nights together had seemed so sweet and lovely, and then it was like - no sex, I'm out. I know now that it was selfishness on his part but at the time I spent a lot of time wondering if it was something I had done that had ruined it. 

Time passed, I saw some other people, moved on, and almost completely forgot about him. Then one day I was bartending at work when a familiar face sat down and ordered a drink. 

“I feel like I know you,” I said.

“Yeah, I met you at the Second City bar,” he said.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, suddenly recognizing him. All the feelings I had pent up from that week suddenly came rushing back. I felt myself losing control and I'm sure my face turned a fire-engine red. “And you never messaged me again.”

After I said that, I had to get someone else to cover the bar for me until he left. It was upsetting. I felt a bit used. Like all that niceness we had built up had been for nothing – in the end he was only after one thing. Thinking back, I remember how unfurnished his house was. I've seen other guys who were just as single-minded, and it seems looking back like they always had totally vacant houses. It makes me wonder if that’s a red flag when it comes to guys. Like maybe empty houses mean empty hearts? Maybe sometimes the guys who don't have enough love for themselves to turn a house into a home are the ones who aren't capable of having a relationship in the first place.

But who knows?

Life Changes

2016 was probably one of the worst years I ever had. I moved in with a boyfriend and it turned out to be one of the worst decisions I ever made. Before moving in with him, I was in a nice condo downtown with a job where I made decent money and lived with my dog that I loved. I loved living downtown as a single female because it allowed me to be social and I felt extremely healthy. My ex lived very far out of the city and I had to quit my job to move in with him. Once I got there, he stopped talking to me for two days and told me I couldn’t drive his car like he had promised I could. He had asked me to move in, but once I did he transformed into a completely different person. He became very controlling and a complete douchebag. The stress of the relationship brought back my smoking habit, which I had kicked 6 years before, and I almost completely stopped sleeping. I was only there for about two months before I moved out one day while he was out at work - I just couldn’t handle him at all. 

I moved back in with my mother. I knew I had to make some changes. My whole life was upside down. I ended up joining a martial arts class. I had recently started therapy and I knew that I needed some physical exercise - a nice place to release things and learn something new.

It was at that class that I met my current boyfriend. At the time he was secretly going through a separation with his wife. When I met him I figured he was married and therefore did not make any effort in pursuing him (not that I make that much effort at pursuing anyone). But I was so attracted to him. If I’d known, I probably would have chased after him from the jump. He was pretty closed off in class, but any time that I got to spar with him I was happy to do so and slowly I began to learn a tiny bit about him. As time went on, I began to have feelings, but his separation was still a secret and no one in the class knew that he wasn’t happy in his old relationship. So for a while I kept my mouth shut.

Fast-forward to now. Things have changed! I have a (semi-)new relationship with a wonderful person whom I love very much. He truly is what I’ve been looking for all these years - with some added, let’s say, quirks (that are for the most part tolerable). I know he thinks the same about me. Our relationship has been pretty much a whirlwind since it started. As soon as we both realized that we liked each other we basically started dating immediately. We quickly found out that we have a lot in common and we have a lot of fun together. I feel like he teaches me something every day.

We had only been dating for a few months when - surprise! - I got pregnant. I have never been pregnant nor have I ever even had a scare with pregnancy. And I have not always used birth control. In all honesty, I thought I might not be able to have children. But I guess when things are meant to be, they’re meant to be.

When we first found out we were pregnant, we both freaked out. We were both in severe shock. He was still going through a divorce and I was still trying to get my life back together. But I didn’t for one second think I didn’t want the baby. I did, however, have the thought: how the fuck are we going to do this? I told my boyfriend if he wasn’t ready to have a child or spend his life with me then that was okay and I would do this alone because I understood it was my choice to keep the child. Although he was unsure at the beginning the more we both thought about it the more exciting it became. Within the first year of our relationship we had to discuss massive future plans, like how many children we wanted. The least fun of all the talks was finances. We had to talk about if we were going to live together, where we would raise a child, did we want to get married, and all the fun things that come along with a long-term relationship. The only difference was we had only been together for a few months. I had only met his parents once! It almost seemed similar to a arranged marriage (but who am kidding? I have no idea what that would be like). In the end, we decided to be together for what we hope is life, and raise this little bundle of joy as a family.

Am I scared? Yes! These are all huge life changes and they’re kind of coming on a whim. As for being a Mom, I have to say I’m excited and a little nervous but I feel like I’ll be good at it. Don’t get me wrong - my mother did the best she could and so did my father. But I learned a lot about what not to do from them. I am generally a pretty down-to-earth, fun, responsible person - at least right now (keyword: now. We’ll see if that changes once the baby arrives.) I’m also, like my boyfriend, a jack-of-all-trades. We both know a lot about many different things and are talented in many different ways. So I hope that we can raise a child well.

I do have to say I’m afraid of giving birth, though. That scares me the most - the pregnancy not so much, the being a mother not so much. But the splitting open and everything coming out including the baby is scary. I just hope it goes by fast and it’s quick. I also hope my boyfriend is there for it because he travels for work and I would like him to witness it.

As for my career or going back to school, I’m not too sure. I know I want this book to be published and that’s all I’ll be working on for myself for this next year pretty intensely. School I would still love to do but I have to see if that’s an option in a couple years, or if I even want to go that route again.

I’m holding on with faith and love, and I can only hope it all works out. I know this will be the thing I work hardest on and not ever give up on.