I didn’t want to talk about this publicly because I was worried that suddenly, G would be judged for the wrong reasons. All that is important is that he was trying to avoid making the same mistakes he has made in the past so that our relationship can continue to grow, rather than be stunted by things moving faster than he is ready for. His commitment to making sure that our story is different than his previous relationships is what helps me remember what is important, rather than dwelling on what has not been said.

But I have struggled a bit, especially when we are starting to learn more about each other’s imperfections and how to deal with them. I find myself saying, “Well he’s doing this because he doesn’t really love me and therefore does not want to be with me.” My immediate instinct is to fight or fly and typically, I’d rather flee than stay. He knows this about me; he knows that if I am upset, I will physically try to remove myself from the situation and recoil at his touch if he tries to pull me closer. He also knows that to help me, he needs to hold me – that while I am in my head processing everything, he needs to physically embrace me so I can’t tell myself something different than the reality.

It helps so much that he is willing to put up with our physical discomfort on top of an emotionally uncomfortable moment. It speaks volumes about how he truly feels about me.

I started seeing a therapist again because I realized while I am no longer depressed, this is my first real relationship. I am involved with someone who is involved with me, who is physically present, who acknowledges that we are together, and who does not have wandering eyes. I realized that my experiences with boys who have done at least two of the three in the past have stunted me – I am anxious when I want to be strong. I am wary when I want to be trusting. And I have absolutely no reason to be either.

She helped me put it together today. Since this was only our second session together, she wanted to know about my dating history. After all, I am 27 and to say this is my first real relationship is somewhat atypical. So I explained.

I told her how my first boyfriend met me, then met someone else, then continued to date me secretly. I told her about my stupidity and vengefulness, and how he manipulated me into staying with him when I wanted to go. Telling a seventeen year old girl that you’re going to kill yourself if she leaves you, while not a sign of someone stable, is certainly a great way to convince her to stay. I told her how I accepted him at face value that when he said he wanted to be with me and only me, that was what he meant – not realizing until later that much of our relationship was shrouded in secrecy and lies.

I told her how the second boy I met cared for me then dismissed me. How we never got around to saying any of those important words: boyfriend, girlfriend, love, together. How I waited for him to tell me the words I wanted to hear, and how they never came. Instead came words that were uglier than I could have ever imagined.

I told her how D was my best friend and how we had a week together before we spent the next year and a half going back and forth. I told her how he took back his feelings for me, proclaiming that it was all one giant mistake and what he thought he felt was just not the case. I told her how his actions told me otherwise – memories of how he would hold my hand, sleep in my room, and always put me first no matter who we were with – and I remembered how I spent most of our relationship waiting for him to say, “I want to be with you.” He never said it and he never would.

I told her about GDB. About how we met and fell and fought and fled. About how I waited for him to ask me to join him in Chicago and he never did. About how he would make me feel like the most important person in his world sometimes, and yet never back it up with action. How I would wonder if he truly meant what he said or if it was simply the fantasy of me, someone who wasn’t present in his every day world. I would hear his words, but not his voice.

As we talked, I began to see a pattern. That up until now, I was with people who would say one thing and do another. I would see things in their behavior that differed from their words – whether it was what I wanted to see or what it really was will never be clear. And then I realized what was throwing me off with G. I have been waiting for him to say “I love you,” relying on words to tell me how he feels, rather than looking to see what he has been doing.

He took those words back because he wasn’t ready to say them, because he wanted to make sure that he was mentally and emotionally in the right place when he does say them. But just because I’ve laid myself bare, expressed how I feel, doesn’t mean that his feelings for me are any different. They seem stronger instead. When I express disappointment or hurt, he looks to himself to see how he can change the behavior – and then does. He doesn’t just apologize and say, “That’s who I am, take it or leave it.” He acknowledges that even if he may disagree with my perspective, that something he did hurts me and we need to understand why to fix it. He also will let me know when I do something that he feels is hindering us from moving forward and help me figure out how to change it. He tells me repeatedly that relationship is about growth – individually and together – and as long as we keep communicating, we can keep growing.

But all this time, I’ve been focused on the verbal aspect of our relationship because I’m a verbal person, and because those are the things that I believed until now help develop a relationship. Until today, I didn’t realize that I was so focused on what was or what was not being said that I was forgetting to look at how he was treating me. I would ignore the signs in the past, trusting that what my perceived partner told me was true.

When my therapist pointed out that 70% of communication is non-verbal, it sunk in. I thought about how just this morning, he would take a moment from getting ready for work to climb back in bed with me, to hug me and to kiss me on my cheeks, my lips, my neck, even when I was only vaguely conscious. I thought about how when we go out together, he is never possessive but always clear about the fact that I am with him and he is with me. I thought about how we sat on the water taxi yesterday and he pulled me up against his chest so I could lean against him while the wind blew through our hair and the boats bobbed on the water around us. He may not have told me he loves me yet, but everything he does says that’s where we are headed.

I know I will still struggle. I know I still want to hear those words from him. But I also know that even if I don’t hear them soon, it’s not the only thing to use as a marker of his feelings for me. He wants to be with me and he is doing everything he can to make sure I know it. My therapist was right. Now I just have to learn how to be more patient and to remember that 70% of communication is non-verbal. If I can trust that 70%, then the other 30% will be even more beautiful than it already is.

Unfortunately, working at least two weekends a month means I have very little time to actually go out and socialize. Working a weekend day means my Friday night, Saturday, and often, my Saturday night is shot simply because I need to get to bed early on Friday night to make it to work before 8am on Saturday. Our classes typically do not end until 6pm, at which point I am exhausted just from sheer boredom and the number of hours I spent in the office without much social interaction. Now that G is up in Baltimore, it is easier because I can just meet him at one of our houses, have a low-key night, and pass out before it even hits 10pm. But working all those weekend hours means that it is difficult to meet up with friends, especially during the summer when everyone travels or heads out of town for wedding after wedding after wedding. When I get invited to potluck dinners or happy hours during the week, I always hate having to say no. I can’t help wondering when they inevitably will stop inviting me, tired of hearing no.

I also struggle with knowing that Baltimore has a huge culture of drinking. When some of my friends who are only a few years removed from their undergraduate degree invite me out to meet them at the bars at 10pm, I almost always end up saying thank you but no thank you. Part of it is I have better things to spend my money on, and part of it is I am just an old fart these days. I like quiet, intimate dinners or movie marathons or going to a park, a beach, or a pool rather than drinking. I phased out of the bar scene about six months after I turned twenty-one. Six years later, that really hasn’t changed much.

It’s difficult for me to not resent my job at times for keeping me from an active social life. I also worry that I am going to resent G for being able to see his friends during the week after work, and not feeling as compelled to do things on the weekends because he got his socialization out of the way. When I want to go places or do things, he often wants to stay home and relax because our schedules are so opposite. He leaves home at 7:30 in the morning and comes back at 8:30 in the evening, before passing out at 9:30. If he meets up with a friend, he gets home later. I leave home at 1:30 in the afternoon and come back at 10:30 in the evening. Where I am able to go to the gym and get errands done during those hours before work, he has to wait until the weekend to get those things done. We struggle with trying to balance fun with needs – in my case, I want to go out and do things and he needs to get things done. Need tends to win over fun.

If more people were around or not booked every weekend, it would be so much easier for me to say, “Hey, you stay here and do this, I’ll go out with x and do things I want to do.” But that seems to be more and more difficult the older you get and the more people become consumed with their relationships and families. And so I end up getting frustrated.

In other ways, I feel like once you become part of a relationship, people write you off and assume you will always be with your partner. That probably is correct, but I am missing that sort of companionship that I would get from my other friends. I surprised myself with the intensity of feelings I experience for G, but at the same time, I don’t only want to be viewed as G’s girlfriend. I was an individual long before I met him, and sometimes I worry I am losing my individuality because I don’t have any other outlets socially to separate the me I am in a relationship with the me I was before I met G. I guess part of it comes from not knowing how to be in a relationship, given that I really haven’t been physically present in one since I was in high school. With relationship experience comes knowing how to balance.

So I guess that’s where I am now. Trying to figure out if/when I should start looking for a new job, if I should start pushing harder about building more friendships not based around drinking, etc. I feel like no matter where I am in my life, the one thing I always struggle with is balance. And right now, I’m feeling a bit adrift.

When I moved to Baltimore, I was still suffering the repercussions of Apple. I felt like I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted, and was just grateful to have finally been given an opportunity to leave New Jersey. I didn’t know anyone, but I was okay with that, because I figured compared to the people I had met in the last two years, with very few exceptions, I could only go up.

It took me a month to get situated, to develop a routine with the gym, the library, and my job. I had to move my bed a few times and reorganize my closet and drawers several times before I felt like it was really my home. I made my first friend through work, a fellow Northerner who had also moved south for her job. I met more people through my roommates, and then even more when I started playing football. I discovered I had latent football skills that translated to being able to catch a ball when thrown in my direction. I suddenly found myself going out every weekend, to a bar, to a house, just being out there and meeting more and more people. And suddenly, I had a life in Baltimore.

I still had my friendships of old and my family, but they were just a bit further distanced. For the first time in a long time, I felt content, like I had a future even if I did not know where it was going to go. I was more concerned with doing well in my job, ensuring that what happened in Berkeley didn’t happen here.

I wanted more. Now that I had finally figured out how to balance life and work, I wanted love too. It only took one date to know G was someone special, but it has been a slow progression of getting to know each other and how we fit in each others’ lives over the last five and a half months. Slow is good though; it means we figure out how to talk to one another, to let each other know when we are frustrated, and how to balance our other commitments and desires with our relationship together. He moved to Baltimore in May from DC and now lives fifteen blocks away from me, which has changed our dynamics considerably. We went from alternating weekends based on my work schedule, so one weekend would be in DC and one would be in Baltimore. Now with both of us in Baltimore, what I originally thought would be easier became more complicated: we can split up more easily, but at the same time, coordinating meeting up can be more difficult. There are two homes to go to instead of defaulting to whomever’s city we were in that weekend. But we are learning.

Meanwhile, I have also been thinking about where I want to go with my future. While I love my job, I have been growing frustrated with the number of weekends I have had to miss out on because I work so many of them. Working nights and weekends, while a considerable step up from where I was with Apple, is not entirely the way I want to go with my career. I love the student services aspect of my job, but I find myself wishing that there were some days where I could go to work during normal operating hours and have the nights free to socialize, spend time with G, spend time being a lazy bum on my couch. I also feel as though there is a general resistance to change and an attitude of don’t fix it if it ain’t broken, which makes things further complicated. Basically, I know this is a situation that will need to change for me to remain happy with where I am.

But I’ve discovered something new; once you’ve said “I love you,” a thousand doors open that were previously closed. All the things I never believed were possible for me suddenly are. Someone loves me. Someone wants to be with me, and I want to be with him too. What this means for our future together, I don’t know, but right now, anything is possible. That’s terrifying in one way, because it means the potential of getting hurt is that much greater. But on the other hand, the potential for so much more happiness is also that much greater.

I know that by the end of this year, I want to have a better idea of what my options are. If I want to stay with my current office, I would need to transfer down to the main campus near DC – and I do, because I love my colleagues and I love the work I do, but I want more of a challenge than I currently have. If I transfer to the main campus, that means leaving Baltimore, a city I have come to love and has done so much for me in restoring my happiness and vitality. My other option is to consider looking at another university within the Baltimore area (and there are many), but leaving my current university and potentially the great benefits I receive from the state due to its nature as a public institution.

This is where the love question comes into play: just because G is in Baltimore now doesn’t mean he necessarily wants to stay in Baltimore; the commute for him is horrendous because the public transit system around here is nowhere near as evolved as the one surrounding New York City. Furthermore, his career path is better served by DC than it is Baltimore, while mine is far more flexible as all I require is an institution of higher education. If our paths continue to follow the same direction, as they have been and I hope they do, there is more than just me to consider in this decision. Suddenly, what seemed like a simple decision feels far more complex process because there are so many more factors to take into play. The one absolute is that I have to make these decisions within the next year, and find a new job in the process because I have a lease to consider as well.

I struggle with wondering if I am losing my autonomy by being in a relationship, and feeling as though I need to take another person into consideration in decisions that have always just been about me. As this is a first for me on all factors (seeing as my previous relationship history involves not knowing I was in one, or a long-distance relationship that was on and off, or a mentally abusive high school relationship, I don’t have a great track record), I am trying to make sure that I am still me, but a me that shares her heart with a man she loves. It seems that one day after turning twenty seven, I am beginning to learn what it means to be a grown up. But in all honesty? I’m excited. I’m excited to see what the future holds, what my twenty-seventh year will bring, and just how much more growing there is to do.

It’s the way we curl into each other, my legs folded in his, his neck on my shoulder, hair and freckles and blue eyes streaming light everywhere.

It’s the way I marvel at how easy it is, for him to be him and for me to be me and us to be we.

It’s the way he laughs, loud and open, so strong I can hear it even when he’s not there.

It’s the way we walk sometimes, hips clanging and feet jumping from one moment to the next.

It’s the way I wonder what it will be like to say “I love you,” the words colliding in my head, but not quite ready to leave my lips.

It’s the way he holds me in his arms as I watch the fading light caress my walls, my floor, the corner of the picture hanging above my desk.

It’s the way we watch the hilly white clouds, the lone telephone pole our placeholder against the transitory fluffiness of the sky.

It’s the way I feel with him, each little moment adding up to overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence that this is exactly how it’s supposed to be.

Originally, there were the analog hearing aids, which meant you showed up at the audiologist, they popped a beige behind the ear piece over your ear, and if the sound wasn’t quite right, they adjusted a screw in the aid with a screwdriver. Now they have what’s called digital hearing aids: little machines with computers inside that are designed to regulate sound. Sound that differentiates between loud, soft, music, voices, and more, theoretically making it easier for you to hear and distinguish words from background noise.

After something like 24 years of hearing aids, and experiencing a huge amount of financial stress paying for the last one I had to get, I learned to pick an insurance plan that covered hearing aids, or at least a good portion of it. I found an audiologist who was willing to work with me and to find what would be right for me, and she was so enthusiastic about trying out a new model that I was too. We even found a giraffe print that blended with my hair but was distinct enough to feel like it was totally me.

But it wasn’t until Monday morning came that the jitters in my stomach started. As easy as it is to take my hearing and my hearing aid for granted, it’s pretty hard to forget that much of my eighteenth year was fraught with frustration and fear because my hearing kept dropping with no warning. There’s nothing like waking up and discovering that you’ve lost precious decibels of hearing overnight to really kick in the fact that your entire livelihood is dependent on one small plastic device, except for waking up a second time and discovering that you’ve lost even more. When the sounds that once made sense are now distorted and incoherent, it defies any sort of logic or reason and manages to completely turn your world upside down.

There’s also the knowledge that should I lose as much as even a decibel, I’m pretty much screwed. When your hearing loss is considered severe/profound and you’re at the very last rung of the hearing aid ladder, there’s not really anywhere else to go but completely, utterly, and entirely deaf. As someone who has lived her whole life as an oral communicator, the idea of not being able to hear as well as I do is nothing short of terrifying.

So it goes without saying that there was a lot riding on this hearing aid fitting: would it do the things I needed it to do? Would it maintain the level of hearing I’ve grown accustomed to and continue to allow me to distinguish between sounds and voices? Would I still need to use a speech amplifier in noisy settings if I had this new hearing aid? And finally, would this hearing aid be a step up from my current model?

The prognosis looked good when I got there: the hearing aid was cute and stylish, it was smaller than my current model, and my audiologist was really enthusiastic about how great this one would be. The trouble started once I put the aid on. See, the thing about digital hearing aids is that by nature, they’re programmed through a computer, and as such are based on where the computer perceives your hearing to be. What the computer doesn’t, and can’t possibly account for is when someone hears exceptionally well with a hearing aid: like me. I’ve been told time and time again that the level and richness of sound that I experience is not typical for someone with the level of loss I have. Not surprisingly, the computer started at a level that might have worked for someone who fit the typical severe/profound mold. Sound was minimal: I could barely tell if there was sound, let alone what type of sound it was, and it was like I had lost my hearing all over again.

It was hard to keep the tears at bay. I had only just taken off my current hearing aid, and I knew logically that my hearing hadn’t changed – just my accessibility had. But it still felt horrendously terrifying to realize that I couldn’t hear, plain and simple.

We kept fiddling with the controls – my voice would vibrate erratically with some programs and it would be loud with others. Sometimes, I could hear my audiologist, and other times I couldn’t. When she held a paper over her lips, I couldn’t distinguish what she was saying at all. When I listened to voice mails left from my mother and my father, I could only make out every few words, when normally I can understand everything they say. When we did a walking tour of the floor, I could barely tell if someone was talking, if it was a human or televised voice.

I wanted to cry, but I also knew that as soon as I put on my regular hearing aid, I’d be able to hear again. And so I asked if I could put my aid back on, just to feel that semblance of normalcy. It goes without saying that I felt a huge sense of relief as soon as I put it on, just in that there was this yes! I can still hear! I can understand my audiologist and my mother’s messages and my father’s voice! I can tell if someone’s typing or walking or if the elevator door is ringing!

We tried with the new aid a few more times before we finally gave up. The computer had been programmed manually now for as loud as it could possibly go, but it still felt like there was a door waiting to be opened, one that had all the richness and the crispness of sound just hidden on the other side. It was like experiencing the world in black and white, but with hints of color here and there, tantalizing, teasing, just so you would know there was so much more, but steadfast in its refusal to indulge you.

We conceded defeat. The new aid would just not work for me. And once we acknowledged that, I could put my hearing aid back on and welcome all those sounds as bursts of color, brightening up my world once again, no longer black and white. It was only a momentary release though, because as soon as I welcomed back my hearing as I knew it could be, I realized just how precarious it really was: that my hearing aid could break at any moment, and I’d have no back up.

My audiologist reassured me that we’ll find an aid that suits me, even if we have to order the exact same model that I wear now, which is no longer in stock in most places. In fact, she went ahead and ordered multiple models, just so our bases would be covered, which is incredibly reassuring. But it’s still scary to think that any one of the new models out there might never be as good as the one I currently have, now two or three years old. If technology is supposed to be getting better and is in fact getting worse, I might have to one day accept that through no fault of my own, no mysterious lapsing of decibels, I just might have to give up all the sounds I’ve become conditioned to hearing. And that thought? Is not one I’m comfortable accepting.

When I got this message, G and I were getting ready for bed. He could tell something happened, because I was visibly distracted, more so than usual. I didn’t know how to say, “Please don’t hurt me” because suddenly I felt this overwhelming fear that he would.

See, there are so many ways in which G is different from the other guys I dated, but the most telling is that I’m not afraid to make plans more than a week out with him. With the others, I always took a que sera sera approach, afraid to give too much time and credence to what could be, fearful that if I gave too much, I’d lose too much of me and my heart. I don’t have that fear with G. Perhaps the most amazing thing of all is how all of my convictions say he’s not going anywhere, and it is that solidity and assuredness that keeps me from holding back, from putting up that wall as I have so often done in the past.

But when I got this message, all I could think about was how guys in the past have changed their minds, what’s to keep G from changing his? What makes me deserve him any more than someone else should deserve the possibility of comfort, companionship and love? It was a moment where my imagination overtook my rationality, and scared the ever-loving shit out of me. It made me want to put that wall up, to put distance between us so that if he were ever going to hurt me, it wouldn’t hurt as much.

It was that same fear that woke me up at 3 am that night, wondering if he was going to change his mind, cheat, behaviors that I experienced with the others in the past, despite knowing how he feels about cheating and how he feels about me. I wanted to write, but I also felt like if I were going to do this, I needed to do this right. I needed to trust that he would listen to me and acknowledge my fears, and I needed to give him a chance to do as much before I put it out there, for everyone to read.

It comforted me that at 3 am in the morning, when I put my arm around his side, he rolled over to wrap me in his arms instead. It comforted me that when we woke up, it was with affection and nuzzles, rather than distance and uncertainty. And it comforted me that when he saw the first few lines of this very entry, that I could simply say, “That text message from last night really scared me, because what if that was us?” Being able to talk about it, to lay it out there on the table and say, “I know you’re different, but sometimes the past can pop up in the present,” and knowing that he understood what I meant? It only reinforced my convictions about him, the solidity and the security I feel in being with him and wanting to know him and experience him.

It’s no secret that he makes me happy, that he is the first man I have been with who makes me feel balanced and relaxed and secure, who makes me want to let him in and know everything, even if it doesn’t paint me in the best light. And even with our little bubble being burst, we still stand here anyway, aware that this could hurt as much as it could take us to the highest heights of happiness. And I’m okay with that.

See, my dad raised my sister and I on stories of fabled jewish kings, like David, Solomon, and Saul. My paternal grandparents told stories about Israel and their childhoods, of family and relatives and history that our lineage was privileged to be part of from before Israel was Israel. And when the high holy days rolled around, we would go to synagogue where we would wait for someone to blow the shofar to let us know it was a new year officially, before we could go out and play in one of the many nearby parks that had jungle gyms and slides and swings. I even went to Hebrew school for a year, where we learned aleph bet and silly songs in Hebrew. Until I was ten, I had a relatively balanced view of judaism – there was the American judaism that my mother’s family practiced, with English language haggadahs at Passover and then there was the Israeli/European judaism that my father’s family practiced, seders and blessings conducted entirely in Hebrew.

And then divorce happened. My father moved out, and so did we. Hebrew school was rejected in favor of dancing school and a bat mitzvah that once seemed a given was no longer an option. My jewish history lessons with my father ended, exchanged for weekends where he would bend over backwards trying to make us happy because of his guilt in leaving us. Sometimes I’ve wondered if my parents had stayed together, would that have changed my feelings about religion or judaism, but the answer is always no. I say this with full certainty because every passover seder, my cousin would poke me to put away my Archie comic because it was my turn to read out loud. I never had an interest in judaism beyond its literary leanings. Yet it’s no secret that my father often blames himself for leaving, for instigating a divorce, leading to the disintegration of my jewish education.

As I got older, I began to understand that my version of judaism and being jewish was more cultural than religious. While I do think judaism has a lot of central tenets that I agree with, I could never quite reconcile my feelings about whether or not there was a higher being to whom we should pray. Beyond that, I began to feel that judaism for me was centralized really within my family and my interactions with them. That while it was more than just the culture and the traditions for them, my culture and traditions stemmed from them. Being jewish for me was directly related to honoring their traditions and their values.

It wasn’t until one of my second cousins married a man who was not jewish when I was a teenager that I began to really question how my family would respond if I were to bring home someone who was not jewish. Hearing how they were so disappointed in her bothered me greatly – what did it matter if he wasn’t jewish if he made her happy? And he unfailingly did – they’re still married today and with two charming adorable little boys no less. When her sister also married a man who was not jewish, and black on top of that, I was shocked at my family when they kept saying how awful it was that two good jewish girls had grown up and completely betrayed the faith. When the second sister became less ingrained in our family, when previously she had been a fixture, I began to wonder if there was more to it, that the coolness and politeness was indicative of a prejudice that I had never fully entertained before.

That’s when the irony of the situation really struck. For a family that experienced so much prejudice and persecution throughout our ancestral history, as recently as my father’s childhood in Israel, you would think that it would have encouraged them to keep a more open mindset. Instead, it seems that my family has retreated into a mindset where it’s okay to not be jewish, as long as you’re not part of the family.

Of course, therein lies the rub. I’ve always known that while someone who had similar values and upbringing would be ideal for me, I’ve also known that judaism was more of a question than a necessity. If my definition of being jewish stemmed from honoring the holidays and traditions my family holds dear and not much more, I would never be comfortable with someone for whom religion was a larger factor in their life. And lo and behold, that’s exactly what I’ve found: a guy who appreciates different cultures and religions for what they contribute, but is not necessarily given over to any one in particular.

I knew my mom’s side wouldn’t care as much as my father’s side. For my mom’s side, they would just be happy that I found someone who kept me entertained for more than three hours at a time, a long-standing joke about my wandering attention. But I was nervous about telling my dad, partially because he is incredibly overprotective, and partially because I worried he would take my lack of religion as a personal failure on his part. I often joke about my dad’s side being pro-semitic, and in so many ways, it’s true. They’re Israelis living in America, and as such, their allegiance will always be to Israel first. Their political agendas will always align with whomever they perceive as being more pro-Israel. For most of my extended family, so much of their identity is tied to being jewish, which was never something that I really related to on any level. So of course, they would all marry jewish men and women, raise jewish babies, and carry on the traditions established by their parents.

I don’t want to say it was a difficult decision to tell him or a difficult conversation to have, because it wasn’t. I was just nervous about telling him, because I worried he’d see it as an insult, or worse, as a reflection of his failures in raising me properly. And indeed, that was a discussion point during our conversation. But the thing that flabbergasted me the most? Was when he raised concerns that should things go badly and end in a fight, slurs would be thrown out simply because I was jewish. Never mind that this guy happens to be one of the most open-minded individuals I have ever had the good fortune to meet, it was just so outrageous and ludicrous to even imagine that being a concern. I won’t pretend that the world is lacking in prejudice because it isn’t, but it just made it clear to me how warped my dad’s side of the family’s perspective is from living in their little cocoon of all-jewish interaction.

Throughout the course of our almost hour-long conversation, I expressed concern that my family would reject me like they did our second cousins should I bring home a non-jew. My father was unapologetically honest – that my aunt would have more than a few things to say, and my grandparents would be disappointed, but that eventually everyone would come around. That ultimately, it would be about me and my happiness, and that I was much closer to my family than my second cousins ever had been.

I still don’t know if I believe him. I know my cousins, who I’ve become more and more distant from over the years as they follow the path laid down by their parents and their parents before them have a difficult time understanding the choices I’ve made because the choices were mine and mine alone. I know my grandparents remain confused and concerned because they see a strong, independent girl who in some ways is living out all the hopes and dreams they had when they were young, but at the same time, she’s far from the safe cocoon that they’ve worked so hard to create and still nourish for my cousins and now their children. I know that even my father, scarred from a divorce that tears open when my sister pulls at the still fresh wounds, worries that I have been so negatively impacted that I’d rather run away than embrace love, or choose love with the wrong guy. And in some ways, I have done that in the past – because it was easier to stay safe from a distance.

But that’s not who I am now. And as much as I try to tell myself that I can’t be who my dad’s side of the family wants me to be, because that’s just not me, a large part of me hates feeling as though I disappoint them and concern them regularly. That because I choose not to be Jewish, but instead am jew-ish, it adds to all the ways in which I am a failure and will only continue to fail them. The funny thing is, for so much of my life I have been me, unapologetically me, and I am so lucky to have found someone who appreciates that about me. Yet I still can’t shake this fear that my choices may lead to a tangible rift between my family and me where the one now remains unsaid.

We’ve learned that it is far easier for me to stand on my tippy-toes to kiss him, a leftover from years of releves and plies, than it is for him to bend down and kiss me. We’ve learned that in his arms I am small, his added eight inches making all five foot seven of me incomparably tiny. We’ve also learned that as children, we both had a mutual hatred of our thighs, too young to understand that we were really looking at our quads.

We’ve discovered that one of our favorite things to do is curl up on the couch and watch the latest delivery from Netflix. We’ve found that one kiss is all it takes to want so much more.

I marvel at how easy it is for him to talk about buying season tickets to the Orioles, because if he’s going to be in Baltimore every other weekend, he might as well. I thrill in how when I met his friends, his arm looped around my shoulders as though affection were no significant venture. I surprise myself with how easily affection comes to me, my hand slipped around his waist or my lips on his shoulder.

I think about how with him, it’s when and not if. I think about how he is so earnest and honest that I want him to know everything about me, good and bad. I think about how it’s so easy to slip my hand in his, to wrap my arms around him, to sleep in his arms every night.

Falling isn’t the right word, because I’m not. There’s no funny swoop in my stomach, no fears or insecurity outside of that monster known as PMS. It’s more like we were walking in the same direction, stumbled across one another, and just kept walking, my arm tucked in his, smiles playing at our lips, and miles and miles of sidewalk to go.

I was also afraid that I’d be revealing myself to be more relationship oriented than I’d like to be, because I’ve always prided myself on choosing to be single instead of indulging in mediocre relationships if only to have a plus one. But then Thanksgiving rolls around, and my cousin brings her boyfriend and my family talks about their potential future, and my stepfather jokes about funding my sister’s eventual honeymoon and how he’ll get me a cat because I’m never getting married, therefore he doesn’t need to spend money on me. Winter vacation rolls around and another cousin sits next to me, her 15 month old son happily running around the house chased by his father and asks, “Are you ever going to get married?” My mother collapses on the couch next to me and says, “When you were at Apple, you told me you were more interested in getting a job than dating. You have a job. Are you going to start dating?” I’m 26 years old, and I’ve already been written off as an old maid by my family.

Admittedly, it has been almost three years since I was last in a relationship. Four years almost, since I’ve met someone who captured my interest and part of my heart.

There have been boys who’ve I’ve considered potential with, wondered what it would be like to date them, what it would be like for them to be transparent with me instead of making me wonder whether or not they cared about me in that way. I came up with imaginary scenarios, imagined integrating our families, and yet, still couldn’t reconcile myself to what it was I really wanted. With my closest friend in Baltimore, I confused friendship for tension. Granted, he did play games initially, but I was forever meeting guys who believed in beating around the bush for months, if not years, and old habits die hard.

I went on two dates with a guy I met on JDate in October. Both times I could tell he liked me and wanted to hold my hand, and both times, I subtly maneuvered my hand into my pocket. Yet I would deliberate ridiculously over whether or not I liked him, somehow unable to see that the simple act of not wanting to hold his hand meant he wasn’t right for me. I chalked it up to an intense hatred of PDA, telling myself that affection is best reserved for in private. I ignored the fact that on the second date, we were in private, in his living room no less, and I still couldn’t bring myself to touch him, let alone kiss him.

So I figured I was just meant to have more fuck buddies and more dalliances, because maybe I just am not the girl to whom relationships belong. I mean, if I’m honest here, half the time I never even knew I was in a relationship until it was over. Not exactly the best track record, to say the least.

I didn’t quite give up. I kept changing my mind about trying dating sites – after all, okcupid worked once, who’s to say it wouldn’t work again? I tried eHarmony for three days before I gave up when all of my “flex” matches were in Tennessee. And then I remembered Chemistry for some odd reason, even though I can’t recall ever seeing any advertising or television ads or anything for it. So I signed up for it.

Within two days, he was in my inbox as a potential match. Less than a week later, our exchanges had taken on page-length missives. Two days later, we switched to gmail and not long after that, we discovered that our three page length e-mails translated to gchat very well. My gut said, “Hang onto him.” My head said, “You haven’t even met him yet.”

But then we did. And as we walked around our first exhibit in the National Building Museum, I realized I wanted him to hold my hand. And when we sat down to build lego structures twenty minutes later, I realized that I wanted him to kiss me. And he did. Not right away. But he did.

For the last few months, I’ve been walking a precarious tightrope. The thing about tightropes is you know there’s a chance you’re going to fall and break something. But you do it anyway. I walked it because love was on the other side. But love can only take you so far. You can mean it, you can want it, you can live and breathe it; but sometimes, it’s just not enough.

Today, not enough came through. So I took my first step off that tightrope. The ladder may shake and quiver under me, but with each step, I’ll come closer to solid ground. It was nothing to do with him, and everything to do with me. Or perhaps it had everything to do with him and nothing to do with me. Quite simply, I want more.

I want love, the kind where you breathe each other’s name every time you exhale. The kind where hearing the other person’s laugh sends shivers up your spine, like it did the first time, and like it will each and every last time. The kind where life may come and go, but your hand is still there for the taking, no matter what happens.

I want the kind of love where it’s not about who loves who more, but how can you love me any more than you already do? I want the kind of love where his hurt becomes my hurt and my hurt becomes his. I want his heart to become my heart and my heart to become his. I want to experience every elation, every sadness, every quixotic moment in bliss because it is what life is made of.

I want to know that I’m the first thing he wants when he wakes up, and the last thing he wants when he goes to bed. I want to know that when he looks at me, he doesn’t see if, he sees when. I want to know that when I finally let him in and am ready for the next step, he will already be waiting for me on the last. I want recklessness, impulsiveness, silliness, because I am worth all of it and more. I want him to buy that damn plane ticket. I want him to want the world for me and the milky way too.

I want him to distract me with laughter when my family hurts me. I want him to brush aside his own work when I need to be handled with care. I want him to yell at me and snap me out of my brain, reminding me to live in this life, here, with him. I want to argue with him, passionately, exquisitely, until we’re out of breath and logic is rendered useless. I want sex, hours of sex and love mingled together, tracing lines on each other’s bodies, finding each freckle and errant hair and the scar from when I fell off a seesaw when I was four.

I want love. The good and the bad, the pain and the joy, the explosion that will occur when I find the one who is meant for me, who will love me with as many atoms as I love him. I apologize in advance if we send the universe out of orbit, but my love is too much for only me.

I want love. I’ve had it before. I’ve seen what it can do and how it makes me feel. I can say it now. Love. Love. I’m ready for you.