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Ok so I’m technically a week away from becoming a fiancé, but, by the time this newsletter arrives in your inbox, I will be officially engaged. Therefore, I will be legally required to say the word “fiancé” as many times as possible for the next year and counting. This transsexual is getting hitched, baby! I’m taking AJ away for her 30th birthday to a little cabin in the Sawatch mountains. There is no Wi-Fi or cell service, but it’s next to a river you can hear rushing when you sleep. I’ve got it all planned out—the champagne, the custom cassette mixtape, the molten rings we picked out this spring from the local jewelry shop in the northeast LA neighborhood we lived in when we fell in love.
When AJ and I first met, three years ago in LA, we did that super gay thing where you compare the lists you each separately made years ago in therapy naming all the qualities you want in a partner. Turns out that she ticked all my boxes: big hair, femme, emotional, willing to top 25% of the time, has been in therapy for 2+ years, and isn’t an alcoholic. She also brought things to the relationship that I didn’t know I needed: my lover of live music, DIY-partner-in-crime, imbued with a soft, sweet energy that has the power to disarm me, and a passion for silence and slowness in equal parts.
We had both decided we’d like to get married, start a family, own a house with a big yard where we could build a garden and watch our dogs chase each other around. Blame it on my sun in Cancer in the 15th degree, but I’ve always wanted to have kids and find a life partner to grow old with. Not even the political pressures of the queer community could sway me from the unshakable inner knowing that I would make a great dad and hubby if given the chance. I knew straight away that AJ was the type of person that I could spend the rest of my life with if I was lucky. Getting married to each other is just the cherry on top.
Speaking of cherries, we’re bringing boatloads of fruit with us to the cabin. Thick juicy squares of baby watermelons, boxes of blueberries, bags of ripe cherries. I’ve always been a fruit person. As a kid, I used to climb trees up at the park with a pocket knife and a mango in my pockets. I would sit high up in the branches alone, where no one could see, carve into the juicy yellow flesh and suck the pit dry. I loved that feeling of inner power that comes with secrecy, having something that was entirely mine. I wanted to be somewhere no one else could reach.
After our first date, AJ and I started obsessively texting about fruit. Turns out AJ was a fruit person, too, but of the pineapple, blueberry, and nectarine variety. She also loved the dark red cherries, affectionately known as sweethearts. My sweetheart in the making. I told her that I’d never been much of a cherry guy, but AJ promised that she’d convince me. I felt my phone buzz in my pocket: it just might take a while to convince you because cherry season just passed us, but don’t worry, I will. It was September. This girl was for real. All I had to do was get out of my own way and let myself fall in love with her. And boy did she make it easy.
We planned to have a fruit picnic in Elysian Park for our second date. The sexual tension brewed between us as we drank yuzu sodas and ate sliced nectarines, peeling clementines and popping them in our mouths. The citrus oils from the rinds burst into the night air as the light drained from the sky. We hadn’t slept together yet. I had politely rejected her proposition to go back to her place and fuck at the end of our first date. I didn’t feel super confident winning over the love of her overly protective and grouchy Chiweenie in a dark apartment under the fog of a few cocktails. I also wanted to be sober the first time we had sex, drunk on nothing but dimmed red lights and the feeling of her body buzzing under my hands. The smell of oranges still ripe on my fingers in the morning. It was everything I wanted and more.
Before meeting AJ, peace was hard to come by in my love life. I used to think that love was hard work. Grueling, really. It was a task that demanded ongoing perfection—Sisyphean by nature—but worth it for those fleeting moments of orgasms, wild laughter, and the bliss of feeling chosen. When AJ and I first met, I wasn’t entirely sure I was healed enough to fall in love again. It was something I dreamed about for my future self and parts of me felt ready, but I was terrified of getting too deep into another relationship that wasn’t healthy for me. I was still struggling to believe that I deserved good things after getting out of a five-year emotionally abusive relationship I had moved to London for.
When my ex and I opened up our relationship, I fell madly in love with someone and lied to her about it for months. I had been backed into a corner for so long that I became this diminuitive, splintered version of myself. I needed a way out, so I became capable of doing things I didn’t know I was capable of. Unrecognizable, even to myself. And while I had done more than my share of work to understand why everything played out the way it did and what my part in it was, I was so afraid that disclosing my past to someone new would fuck everything up all over again.
When I was still living in London and my relationship was falling apart, I had this perverse masculine fantasy of moving to Los Angeles and becoming a woodworker. I wanted to get a truck, grow my beard, live stealth, live alone, and perform manual labor for 8-10 hours a day until my body gave out. I didn’t want to feel. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to know how much my heart had broken and how much strength it would take to rebuild it.
Then, I met AJ and everything changed. The world looked brighter, greener somehow. Everything felt possible. I wondered if this love could somehow be a reset—maybe it was time for a new chapter. But AJ had told me on our first date that her ex had fallen in love with someone else while they were dating and wasn’t entirely honest about it with her. After a botched attempt at polyamory, things ended badly between the two of them. It was her first queer relationship. I listened to the story and quietly nodded along, affirming her experience. I wondered when I would tell her about mine.
A few weeks later, AJ invited me over for tea one night and I told her everything. She listened patiently as tears streamed down my face and the blue butterfly pea flower tea went cold in our cups. After I was finished, I told her I’d understand if she didn’t want to keep dating anymore. She looked at me with love in her eyes and asked if she could hug me. She held my face in her hands, my cheeks hot with shame, and said she was proud of me. She told me I should be proud of myself for the way I had handled things. It turns out, I had done the work on myself that her ex didn’t, and she had taken accountability for her part in the dynamic too, something that my ex could never do.
It was as if the universe brought us together to heal each other’s pasts and show us a different way forward. This is what happens when you do the work. You get to meet your match, your equal. You stop feeling small and ashamed. The path in front of you folds open, becomes easier to walk with your person by your side, cheering you on. I never knew that love could leave me feeling so balanced and full, so grounded and present. That everything I give someone else in a relationship could come back to me, tenfold. Honestly, I’m loving every minute of it.
AJ and I have talked about what happens if things don’t work out, like what we would do if we broke up or got divorced or decided that being together wasn’t good for us anymore. I used to think that talking about breaking up was a bad thing. Like a bad superstition. As if even considering the possibility would somehow bring about the end of a relationship. But we have these conversations with love and care for each other and a sobriety that is reassuring. I’d like to think that no matter what happens, we both trust the process.
And right now, I can’t wait to embark on this new, wild adventure together. One that will hopefully bring us babies and blessings and lessons in the type of love I’ve always dreamed of. Commitment that is free of martyrdom or guilt or punishment. A love that is autonomous, durable, and freely given. Interdependence.
Everyone kept asking me for years what brought me to Los Angeles, and I never had a very good answer. The way the palm trees glimmered in the morning haze, the salt in my hair at the beach, the men’s fashion—idk. Something felt like it was beckoning me, but I didn’t know exactly what. My reason changed every time someone asked me the question. The truth is, I didn’t know why I moved to LA. I just had this feeling that I needed to pack up my car and my dog and drive out West to see what was waiting for me.
Looks like I found my reason.
xo
So happy for you, you are beaming ❤❤❤
i love love!! so happy for the both of you; you write so wonderfully about love & partnership & it makes me hopeful <3