So, I’m still here, at the happiest place on Earth. Today we did MGM for the second time. Having six day passes, we need to repeat two parks. The Magic Kingdom, the hands down favorite, we saved for tomorrow. I should say this is all at the whim of my daughter, Erika. This is her present, and so we go with what she decides.
This vacation is very difficult at times. Today was another hard day, and for me again I think the ultimate factor is the heat. I hate to say I’m just a heat wimp who can’t take it so please don’t take me south in the summer. But maybe that’s what I am. I hear others around me complaining about the heat a lot. I don’t know how close they feel to the edge. I’ve even thought that maybe I’m just being a baby, that everyone feels like death is not a bad option to escape the heat, and they are just soldiering through. I don’t know.
In any case, today most of my difficult moments involved my wife, Carole. As I’m writing this, it is 11:35 at night, so in less than half an hour it will be our 11th anniversary. We count that anniversary as the day we met. That may not be fair in comparing the length of our relationship to straight couples who met and married on different days. Hopefully they did that. It is legal, I believe, for straight people to marry strangers. But we won’t go there.
In our case, we didn’t rush our ceremony, mostly because it isn’t legal. I had to get divorced. I had been separated for seven years, so a divorce was a formality, but it took time. Then Carole’s father was dying, and it wasn’t clear when that would happen. We ended up having a ceremony in church in August, 2005. So we have two anniversaries.
We count the day we met as our anniversary. Lots of gay couples do. I’m sure that if we were straight and of opposite genders, we would say something like we met in 1997, moved in together in 1998, and got married in 2005. Tomorrow we will count it as our eleventh anniversary.
We know three lesbian couples who have been together longer than we have. Every other lesbian couple we know have been a couple for a shorter time than eleven years. We know lots of straight couples, including lots of family members, who have been together longer. These are mostly our aunts and uncles, people like that. I’m afraid those couples are dwindling, though.
Carole has been step-mother/other-mother to my children for all that time. Much longer than their bio father had anything to do with them. My son, Nicholas, has had her as a parent for more than half his life. Carole has lived with them since they were 12 and 10, and at times it has been very, very difficult.
Carole and I are opposite in many ways. We may not seem like a likely couple. We met on the internet, at a gay AA meeting. Our first communications were online, and so we fell in love at first through writing.
This has good and bad aspects, and since we’re together, I think we might as well concentrate on the good. In writing, we fell in love with no physical aspects involved. We didn’t know what the other looked like. Before we met, we talked on the phone and exchanged photographs. This was in the days before digital cameras and fast internet. The context of our communication was at first AA. I was 11 then 12 years sober. She was no years than one year sober. AA was the foundation of my life. When we finally did commit to one another, I told her that she had to continue in AA in order to be with me. It was a non-negotiable. It’s that important.
So the ways we are different. She’s an extrovert who loves to meet people, I’m an introvert who hates to meet people. She likes to dance and sing, I won’t dance or sing. She likes to watch and play sports, I don’t like to watch and I won’t play. She likes vacation, I don’t. She likes to talk things over right away and until they are resolved. I like to deny and ignore the fact that something is wrong, and hope it will go away.
Our similarities are more important, though. Beginning with AA and all that entails, it is awesome to be in a relationship with someone who is trying to work the same program. We speak that same language in that respect. Our politics are similar too, and that’s very important to me. I have a hard enough time with friends who disagree with my politics, I can’t imagine my partner disagreeing. To a certain extent we share spiritual beliefs enough to belong to the same church. She participates at a much higher level than I do, but we can belong together and attend together.
As I’m writing this, midnight has passed, and we’ve been together for eleven years. Just like long time sobriety, it causes me to wonder from time to time what we have that has enabled us to make it this far when so many other fail to do so. It is, honestly, often, wonderful to be with her, very much like at the beginning. Most of the time it’s just comfortable and at times it’s very difficult. I’ll give most of the credit for keeping us together to her. If something is wrong, she won’t ignore it or deny it, like I probably would do until it was too late. She makes sure we work on it, and for my part, I usually cooperate with the work eventually. I think we both understand that the intoxicating, falling in love feeling doesn’t last. I accept that more than she does.
Speaking just for myself, I love the comfort of the history we share as it gets longer and longer. At Disney, people travel for the most part in families, and I wouldn’t trade mine. Sometimes I actually fear what we have as we become more and more comfortable, because that would make it more unbearable (and I do know that isn’t a correct construction as things are unbearable or they are not, there aren’t degrees) for it to end, which it will have to, at least by death. I look at old couples sometimes and wonder how long they’ve been together and if we will make it that long. I want her to be the one I hobble into church with, the one I take the grandchildren to Disney with. I can look at those old couples (and really for all I know they just got together last week) and I picture a nice new phase of life as a couple.
We actually are in a transition to a new phase as the kids finish college. I know some couples fear this and fall apart when it happens. I’m looking forward to it. As much as I have loved actively mothering these two for all these year, the time coming of simple couplehood will be something we haven’t experienced yet. I’m so glad that we get to do it with all of that mostly nice history behind us.
