they're not enjoying themselves or you look like shit or they're bored or wishing they were with someone else. There's the amazing, inexplicable elation of hearing the words "I love you" directed at you, but often what immediately follows is the terror of what's going to happen next. True and deep and crazy uncontrollable love hurts when you're apart. When you're in a crowd of people across the room from each other.
Or when something is wrong, or maybe even before you were together and they don't know how amazingly in love you are, and you're standing right in front of each other but can not touch.
Love hurts when it is such sheer ecstasy that you are unequivocally, universally terrified of it, and what it could become, or when it would end.
This is how it was with Alex.
A story I read once said that for a boy-meets-girl story to exist, the boy and girl have to actually meet. This wasn't so for Alex and I. For the first six months of our relationship, everything was virtual.
I generally despise the whole "online dating" thing, but what was strange about Alex and I was that we knew each other, we'd just never actually met. We knew a lot of the same people, hung out in a lot of the same places, even went to a lot of the same parties, but had never actually spoken to each other. When we'd both responded to a friend's post about the best grilled cheese in the city we got into a heated debate over whether or not Parmesan crusted bread made the sandwich, which eventually led to further conversations via instant messenger about our favorite food hangouts. Eventually we started telling each other our real life problems- which is always easier to do when you're talking to someone you don't actually know and isn't involved, but also made simpler by the fact that I didn't have to explain who individual people were, since many he knew- and eventually the simple conversations often became attempts to cheer each other up. And after a month of comparing favorite sushi bars and chip shops, while consoling each other during real-world fights, bad dates, illnesses, I started to notice how different chatting with Alex made me feel. The idea of getting online and seeing him there made me...excited.
Or when something is wrong, or maybe even before you were together and they don't know how amazingly in love you are, and you're standing right in front of each other but can not touch.
Love hurts when it is such sheer ecstasy that you are unequivocally, universally terrified of it, and what it could become, or when it would end.
This is how it was with Alex.
A story I read once said that for a boy-meets-girl story to exist, the boy and girl have to actually meet. This wasn't so for Alex and I. For the first six months of our relationship, everything was virtual.
I generally despise the whole "online dating" thing, but what was strange about Alex and I was that we knew each other, we'd just never actually met. We knew a lot of the same people, hung out in a lot of the same places, even went to a lot of the same parties, but had never actually spoken to each other. When we'd both responded to a friend's post about the best grilled cheese in the city we got into a heated debate over whether or not Parmesan crusted bread made the sandwich, which eventually led to further conversations via instant messenger about our favorite food hangouts. Eventually we started telling each other our real life problems- which is always easier to do when you're talking to someone you don't actually know and isn't involved, but also made simpler by the fact that I didn't have to explain who individual people were, since many he knew- and eventually the simple conversations often became attempts to cheer each other up. And after a month of comparing favorite sushi bars and chip shops, while consoling each other during real-world fights, bad dates, illnesses, I started to notice how different chatting with Alex made me feel. The idea of getting online and seeing him there made me...excited.
