More A Way Of Life… Look, this is just between you and me

The L Word. And The M Word

Ok, it's time to come clean about some stuff. I've been waiting to be able to tell a couple of people personally before going more public with this, which I now have, so now I can.

I've mentioned that I'm attached these days, and that I'm very happy. I've mentioned the damn near perfect time we spent in Rye last weekend. I've even mentioned that I'm prepared to acknowledge that I was wrong about something (and that never happens).

A couple of people have joined the dots, but just to get explicit:

I am utterly, passionately, unashamedly and overwhelmingly in love.

This is not an admission I expected to make any time soon - you all know how cynical I am about life generally and relationships in particular, but here I am.

In many ways, and for many actually very good reasons, I'd settled to regard myself as one of life's 'designed-to-be-single' people. I've been quite damaged emotionally over the years, in ways that stem from both previous relationships and earlier experiences, and I'd reached the conclusion that I was in fact too damaged to feel the good emotions again. And I was at least resigned to the consequences of that, and really even okay with them.

An experience I had recently when a perfectly delightful young man and I started getting on very well, which I had to end when I realised that I simply didn't/couldn't feel a greater emotional connection to him than that of friendship (you know who you are - sorry again), reinforced in me the fact that somewhere inside, I wasn't capable of being in love for real.

But I was wrong. And now I want to shout it from the rooftops. He's my man, and I'm his. And I don't ever want that to change. Me: Cynical git, misanthrope and all-round pessimist. Except I'm not any more, because he makes me be better than that.

And the thing that I was wrong about? Read this and then come back to watch me eat my words.

Done? Then I'll admit it: Over dinner at the weekend, I found myself starting a sentence and only realising as I did what the only possible next sentence was going to be. Sentence one was that I couldn't think of any reason why I wouldn't want what I'm feeling right now to last forever, and that I could actually think of a lot of very good reasons why I'd rather it did.

Sentence two therefore involved me asking him to marry me.

And he said yes.

And yes, I still think on some level that it would be better that we don't ape heterosexual conventions and create our own, but I want us to be recognised with the same validity as a straight couple would be. And given the state of the law in the UK it's going to be a *long* engagement. But we'll wait.

I don't recognise myself at the moment, but whoever I am, he's a big improvement.