blakspring

To tell or not to tell, that is the question.  And how much to tell, and when to tell it.  This is probably the blogger’s dilemma, or at least I know it’s not just me because I’ve talked to other bloggers about it and have seen it mentioned in various posts.  Through blogging we open our personal lives up to whoever may come across it, and hopefully we’ll tell the truth, even if it might be slightly embellished.  The things we don’t tell, the parts that we keep to ourselves, can sometimes be the most important.

And so I’m finally coming clean because yes, I have been holding out on you all.  I knew that I would eventually write this post and have been looking forward to it, but I didn’t want to jump the gun.  Now, I think, is the right time to say that there’s a special guy in my life.  I’ve been dating him for over a year and I’m probably as shocked about this as anyone could be.  I’ve mentioned him before on the blog, though not specifying the nature of our relationship.  Yeah, it’s Ron Russo (which incidentally is not his real name - it comes from an inside joke at work).

Ron Russo is a complicated character.  We met when I first started at the school though we didn’t know each other very well, and from the little that I did know of him he just seemed very immature and ridiculous.  And of course not to mention the fact that I was a married woman whose one goal in life was to keep her marriage together, so men in general didn’t really register on my radar.  After D and I split, I really needed to find myself and grow into my new identity.  I wasn’t looking for any relationship and certainly not any sort of emotional commitment.  But Ron Russo somehow got it into his head that I was the one for him.  He started dropping by the library often, sending me silly text messages, and inviting me out to dinner.  The more time we spent alone and the more I got to know him, the more I realized that he is a quirky, interesting, and sweet guy.

I’m still not sure why he likes to come off in public as the silly doofus with no worries when he is so much more than that.  He’s very intelligenent, a math genius, musically inclined, and obsessed with softball.  He has a big heart and not much fazes him.  He has a habit of coming across something in a book or on the Internet and then running away with it, so that suddenly we’re discussing deviancy in the Puritan communities of the 1600s or the coal mine fire that’s been burning under Centralia, Pennsylvania for the last 40 years.  Oh yeah, did I also mention he has an MFA in poetry.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s got his faults too, though I’ll keep those to myself (and he knows what they are).  In fact, about three months into our dating, I pretty much had it and was ready to call it quits.  I also wasn’t sure if I wanted to be in a long-term relationship.  It was all very confusing.  He was giving me so much attention, which felt so good to me at one of the loneliest points of my life.  And I didn’t want to confuse that with whether I liked him or not.  I warned him from the outset that he will have to be patient, and give me space, and that I might realize that I like how he’s making me feel more than I like him.  I told him that after a 12 year monogamous relationship I was not ready to call anyone my boyfriend and so I referred to us as “free agents”.  This free-agent status is something that we’ve both taken advantage of, perhaps me more than him, though I think for the last several months we’ve been free agents in name only.  In fact, I shocked Ultra when I referred to Ron Russo as my boyfriend to some people in Costa Rica.  So, yeah, I guess I have a boyfriend.

I wanted to tell you guys sooner but Ron Russo knows about the blog from before we were even dating so obviously he would see what I wrote about him.  He knew about all the doubts that I had going into this but I didn’t want him to have to read it in black and white.  For this same reason I never wrote about anyone else that I was involved with because, even though he knew that this was part of the deal, I didn’t want it right there in his face.  But now it’s been about 14 months and my feelings have grown a lot in that time.  Ron Russo is the guy that I would not have appreciated ten or even five years ago, which is a shame because our personalities fits so well together, we have a lot in common, and he makes me happy.   But maybe I needed all that time and a totally different relationship to grow into the person who appreciates this now.

Also, about a year after I gave him the application (because he is definitely a procrastinator) he finally got a passport.  Seriously, this was a definite deal breaker.  If there’s one thing you guys know about me it’s that I love to travel, and if I’m gonna be with someone long-term they’ve got to be willing to travel with me, at least some of the time.  And I cannot wait to see that first stamp in his brand-spanking-new passport.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 10:17 pm and is filed under mi vida estupida. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.