We’ve been together for six years. It’s no lifetime, for sure, especially when you spend the first two years just figuring out that you even are together. But by the time I’d been with Del for six years, I knew it was over. Six years with one person has always felt like a lifetime before.

One year with a person has always felt like a lifetime before.

I can’t say that I know what the secret is, but here’s what I suspect: Dumb luck.

Though I don’t know how I managed to get a different kind of relationship, I can totally say what is different: I like him. Like, as a person. I look up to him and I respect him. And when he tells me that something I’ve said is a good idea I get SO excited because the one thing I want more than anything in the world is his good opinion.

But yeah, I’m still not sure how that happened. I’ve always involved myself with guys I could comfortably look down on. That’s a pretty terrible thing to say. It doesn’t make me sound like a good person at all. Obviously all I can say about that is that it was a function of having such low self-esteem that I couldn’t face the idea of being with anyone who had anything on me because I felt like I’d get pushed around. For the same reason, I have always involved myself with very slender guys, where I always felt like I could probably take them if I had to. Anyhow, these are bad dynamics to have in a relationship.

You might then say, “well the secret is to have good respectful dynamics in your relationships. That sounds simple.” But it didn’t go that way with Ian. Some day maybe I will actually document some of our early relationship, but he was pushy and privileged and he would get disrespectful whenever I tried to explain how something he had said or done had negatively impacted me and he outright tried to manipulate me into suppressing things that bothered me because he didn’t want to deal with it.

Butsometimes when he stood up to me and was pushy, it wasn’t moral and emotional laziness, it was because he really believed I was in the wrong. And no-one had ever done that to me before (they would whine, sulk or manipulate if they didn’t like something I’d done. But no-one ever just stood up to me). And when I was able to communicate to him that there was a moral wrong to his dictating what I was and wasn’t allowed to feel or what did and didn’t deserve sympathy, he took me very, very seriously.

He is one of the first men to openly tell me and without any resentment or insecurity that I am smarter than him. And I don’t argue it, but, it is by a margin so narrow that I am aflutter with pleasure whenever he tells me that an idea or solution of mine is particularly clever. Which was what started this whole train of thought in the first place. What is really, really different with Ian is that we have never stopped craving the other person’s good opinion. I think that taking care of other people is the most fundamentally important part of being human. Why would you even bother with a relationship where you didn’t take care of eachother? What would be the point? And I think, if he didn’t articulate it, he still felt that being there for the people in his life was important to him. And I think that care has informed a lot of our time together. I’ve never had a long-term relationship with someone who was always careful with me before.

It’s been six years. And it’s nice.