quizzical pussy

A friend asked how long Laramy Fuquerton and I have been together now.

“Well, I mean…” I tilted my head thoughtfully, “It really depends what you’re counting as ‘together’…” We started fucking about a year ago, but we’d been making out for a month or two at that point. We sort of sauntered casually into “seeing each other” and lingered there a while until we finally admitted we were “boyfriend and girlfriend” about six-ish months later (our friends-in-common were all pretty amused when we finally figured that one out.) But we still didn’t say “I love you” until months after that. And we started being “in a relationship” on Facebook a while later.

It’s possible that we have commitment issues. Either that or he’s just been incredibly understanding of the ones I know I have. Which really aren’t that horrible. It’s just the swift, jarring kind of commitment that scares the shit out of me, so my tendency is to take it to the other extreme: the laughably obvious kind of commitment that gets lapped by molasses-flavored glaciers.

As a result, Laramy and I don’t really have an “anniversary”. In fact, anniversaries confuse me for the reasons stated above. They’re so arbitrary. I understand wedding anniversaries. A wedding is a finite date that you can point to and say “something started here”. But short of that, it’s murky: the kind of relationships I have don’t have inaugural ceremonies. I have never, in my life, thought I was on a “first date”. Of course, you don’t need a first date. You can use any of the following milestones as your anniversary:

• first awkward pat/hug
• first kiss
• first grope
• first manual sex
• first oral sex
• first intercourse
• first penetration with produce (not advisable, btw)
• first fight
• first time you met each other’s friends
• first time you met each other’s parents
• first time you had to apologize for asking to meet your new paramour’s parents because s/he’s an orphan

…and the list goes on and on. If a bunch of these things happened to occur on the same day, that makes it easy (note: I did not just call you easy), but otherwise it ends up being, like I said, pretty arbitrary. Then, some people have the grand idea of celebrating anniversaries for every little progression in their relationships, which for me would feel much like the:

• first time I wanted to die.

Seriously, that would suck.

Edwin Pomble, my boyfriend previous to Laramy, was more pro-commitment and pro-fanfare. To give an example, he told me he loved me the second time we had sex, when we’d known each other for a month, tops.  (I’m not saying that’s a bad idea in general, only that I sure as goddamn found it alarming.) He and I were together for four years, and I never quite got the hang of when our anniversary was (or what, precisely, it commemorated).  I was pretty sure it was in a month ending in “ber”, but I never advanced beyond that. If I’m being honest, I wasn’t very happy in that relationship and it’s possible that I actually just didn’t find it particularly worth celebrating. So my brain passive-aggressively refused to remember the date, which was a dickish move. And it bothered him that I couldn’t be arsed to keep track of which day in which “ber’. It should’ve been a clue to both of us that it was time to move on.

So I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been with Laramy. A year-ish. A really great year-ish, during which I’ve gotten to get closer and closer, at my own pace, to a person who amazes me and complements me and tolerates me and makes me happy. I’m incredibly lucky that way. And we’re worth celebrating, but I honestly think we do, constantly, in our own ways.

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