Where To Begin?

I don’t even know where to begin. After a whirlwind weekend which fulfilled long-standing fantasies and ended with yet another great conversation, where can one possibly begin? This will require multiple posts.

The best place to start is him. For the sake of this blog I’ll call him Luke. He is taller than me – just enough that the perfect place for me to kiss him is the side of his neck. He’s got jet black hair and is clean-shaven. He recently ran a marathon and works out regularly and has the most amazing arms which are perfect for holding me down while… oh, sorry, you probably want to actually know ABOUT him. Right.

He works full-time as a musician and can have great conversations about music and religion and geology and many other topics. He wrote his senor psychology paper on bdsm and religion. He’s taken me to church twice now, where he is the perfect gentleman to the au-naturale, blue-haired ladies. I’ve met some of his friends and he’s meet a few of mine. He’s very open about his history, his family, his friends, and where he is in his life. He flagrantly disregards use of the Oxford comma. I can forgive this this fault because, well, nobody’s perfect, right?

I recently spent ten days at a monastic retreat and just returned to the real world. We made plans to hang out Saturday night into Sunday and ended up bouncing around the city Saturday evening. At one point he turned to me and said “so at this point the ball is in your court. I really want to be in a relationship with you. So I’ll leave that with you. If you want to have that conversation, let me know.” So I waited about 3.7 milliseconds and then pounced on him for a kiss (we were in his car) and told him that was a conversation I very much wanted to have. Lots of smiling and kissing ensued.

We continued that conversation on the way home from church. I will be away for the next six weeks and so we talked about how that will work and also how we’d structure a relationship in terms of it being open in some aspects. I was able to recognize and verbalize that while I am happy to allow the kink/bdsm side of our relationship to be open, I also want to retain at least some aspect of physicality just between us. So the conclusion was (and he left it up to what I want) that we are open to playing with other people (together and apart), if we play with other people we’ll share that with each other, and we will keep vanilla sex between us.

With all that ironed out I said, “yes, I want to be in a relationship with you.” =)
(Note: he was driving, so hand holding ensued instead of kissing.)

Deciding to be in a relationship is awesome and scary and exhilarating all at once. Because of the timing (my being away for the summer) we’ve of had to make it work in small bursts rather than things growing as naturally as they might otherwise. I am looking forward to being back and seeing how things will work when we have the luxury of time. In addition, having an open relationship is a fairly wild, new, and scary experiment for me. What makes it feel safe is that I am deeply impressed with his ability to communicate. I trust that if things change with him he will tell me, and that I will be able to tell him what my needs are. I see it as a work in progress, and as long as communication and trust are at the heart of things, I don’t see how we can lose.

Before he took me to the subway station we were sitting on a couch chatting with two of my friends. He casually put his arm across the back of the couch and gently rubbed the back of my neck. It was a small, intimate gesture and it made me feel really good. He was attentive to me even while we made small talk with my friends. It was really sweet.

Six weeks is a long time!