Bringing Mae Flowers

I thought I would never get married.

I’ve always been slow to trust and even slower to love, and I didn’t think I could find someone willing to wait for me to develop feelings. And I was okay with that. I was happy being single. I was never lonely, as I had (and still have) a lot of friends and family around me. I had fun dating around without worrying about love or romance. For nearly 6 years, I lived a complete and meaningful life alone. There was no missing piece, no void to fill, no secret longing — and I stand by that even now that I’m engaged.

My partner doesn’t complete me.

I wrote about this before, and I still believe it; My partner doesn’t complete me. He doesn’t make me feel whole, or give me meaning, he just adds a new dynamic to the beautiful life I already had. In other words: I didn’t need to be with him to be happy, but I’m happy to be with him. And I think that’s the way it should be.

Love grows with time and trust.

For a demiromantic like myself, love is earned. Romantic attraction doesn’t spring up after a couple of dates, it grows slowly as trust and emotional connection deepens. It can (and did) take months of talking to each other and dating before I could say that I liked him “like that”. I knew that he was physically my type when we first met. I also knew that he had the kind of personality I liked. But knowing that you could be attracted to someone and actually having the emotion are two different things. It took 3 months for me to go from platonic interest to attraction— and for me, that was record speed.

I’m glad it took time.

Even when I was a teenager, I didn’t believe in love at first sight. Maybe it’s because of the trauma of watching my mother jump from relationship to relationship, or maybe it’s because I’m demi, but I always believed that trust is the foundation of love. Trust takes time to build, but he is very patient. I knew I liked him 3 months in, but it took several more for attraction to blossom into the emotion that I call love. And because it took time to fall in love, I got to know him fully and deeply. By the time my heart had fully let him in, I was certain he was someone I could spend the rest of my life with.

My life has changed since we’ve meet.

Love is transformative. While being with him hasn’t changed who I am as a person, but it has changed my life in many ways. My daily life looks different than they did before we met, and I love what it’s become. I can’t go back to how things were before, because now that he’s become a part of my life I can’t imagine losing him. While I can imagine being happy if we never met at all, but I can’t imagine being happy if I lost him now.

This doesn’t mean the journey is over.

I love my partner and hope to live the rest of my life with him, but unlike fairytales, the story doesn’t end with a wedding. We still have many joys to experience and challenges to face together. In many ways, love is a choice we make every day, and I hope it’s a choice we continue to make for years to come.