Reader, I... Met His Parents

So. Given that my life has been nothing short of terrifying recently (chronically miscalculated my student loan and thought I was going to die, penniless and half-eaten by an Alsatian as combined work and poverty pressures induced my heart to burst like a tomato in the microwave)... I thought I would go for the best form of catharsis there is available: 'publicly' embarrassing myself on my public blog. See now, this wouldn't be real humiliation, I told myself, since virtually no-one reads this anyway. The 3 people who happen to follow probably know enough about me to divine that I am a huge embarrassing mess of a laydee anyway. Well, as huge as you can be at almost 5'4'' (almost! almost! Talk about being cut to the quick! 'So that I may calculate your BMI, please tell me: are you 5'4''? You look like a 5'4''' *shamefacedly* 'No, I am afraid I am 5'.37''...').

You - people who have read any recent posts - will know that I am in love with a man (scandale! you cry derisively. As if we thought you were in fact in love with an oversized cucumber!). Not just any man, however. He has sort of a 'web presence' like myself, and so I threatened to very slightly roll back the sunroof of anonymity last time. However, I got an email about it, so he will now be referred to as 'The Libertarian.' He jokingly referred to himself as 'im upstairs' once, I believe, but I know that I for one may confuse this with God, so for now he is, very simply, The Libertarian or TL if I'm feeling very slovenly.

Anyway, The Libertarian is very, very good to me. He is, in fact, so good to me that I was terrified he was actually a hologram for the first month of our relationship and I occasionally woke up afraid that he would have disappeared from my side like a hallucination (usually to be greeted by the halcyon view of his back while he slept peacefully...). He brought me a rose on our second 'real date' - which he carried intact from effectively one side of the city to another for about 2 hours or something. He took me to a formal dinner at his alma mater and introduced me to one of his best friends. While this was occurring, he got slightly tipsy and preceded to grin at everyone around him, especially me, squeezing me close to him affectionately and rubbing my arm. The next day, he showed me around the town there, refusing as always to let me carry my own bag and insisting on taking a picture of me, be-shawled, because I looked 'so cute.'

I could see, very early on, that I was going to fall in love with him. I could see it coming like Michael Jackson can see facial collapse coming. I reacted badly when I realised I loved him, managing to scare him in the process. Romance-novel-esque as it is, it became clear to me that I'm really not used to being treated well, and I don't trust it, tragic as that sounds. He is determined to make being treated well the norm for me, and I thought I might almost be getting there, but today came a warning.

I went to his house to help him ice Christmas cookies with his mum, and had a very good time doing so, because I tend towards the artistic and got carried away doing elaborate decorations, like a randomly-shaped cookie which I turned into a little Christmas scene with two tiny carollers, two giant musical notes, a bell and some snow. I received many compliments from the pair of them, and then his mum went out to get some things. A fair few hours later, as I was preparing to leave, she said she had a present for me (!!) and it turned out to be a cookie-icing book, with all sorts of elaborate designs and suggestions.

Now that threw me off balance enough as it was, but then she joked about how it would help me when I 'start my business' and said that 'you have a real talent there.' TL agreed with her and smiled at me while holding my hand. We flipped through the book together, commenting on the various designs. They kept being very encouraging and kind, and I felt like I had just swallowed a brick, all wibbly and sure that my face or voice would soon slip out of my control.

Soon afterwards I left - and made it back home without bawling my eyes out. However, the whole episode made me wonder when I am ever going to get used to this whole 'people being genuinely nice to me' business. I just can't get my head around it. Compliments are not compliments to me - they are spiked apples, which I scan for concealed razors. Kindness is a Venus flytrap, waiting for me to hover over it so that it can snatch me into the black depths of its jaws and rip me to shreds.

In short, I love him but I'm just so goddarn AFRAID to have faith that it might be OK. That I might NOT end up eroded and cynical again. I didn't even get dumped last time round - it was me who left - but that didn't stop it from being a thoroughly painful experience which made me get the way I am now. TL and I have fought once, and we made up within an hour, but the feeling I got was so strong that I will never forget it. In the brief stretch of time when I believed we were 'over,' I had a terrible pain in my chest and I felt sort of numb inside my head. I was travelling to Waterloo and when I got there, I burst into tears. What worried me was that I didn't feel surprised. I felt resigned. Something was always going to go wrong, and now it had. Oh, well done me, I had vindicated myself.

I need to lose that feeling. Not so that every hint of friction comes as a huge, unsettling shock, but just so that I am not looking to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. 'You want to be careful that in worrying about not being too clingy, you don't drive him away,' my wise friend told me. Indeed, and I don't want to feel that my unfortunate childhood has laid some inescapable curse on me.

Yet, the free, relaxed, equal nature of TL's interaction with his family hurt me. I would say, 'for want of a better word,' if it were true, but - it did. It hurt me. I have been unable to shake off the feeling, despite my horror of marriage and lack of sentimentality about love, that this is the 'One.' I don't believe in 'the One' because there are many compatible people out there, but I do believe there's probably likely to be a 'One' you're more able to marry than the others, and oh boy are the warning klaxons sounding about TL. He has the same feelings about me, he says, but I am his first love, so... eh.

Looking at his family does not make me jealous, but it does make me feel aware of how inadequate my own relationship with my family is, even though there's not a lot I can do about that. It makes me want to be part of his future even more, to be part of that small but intimate family circle. Yet I have stop thinking as if it were certain with him... I need to CHILLTHEFUCKOUT and for some reason I just can't. It is what I have always wanted, being dangled cruelly in front of me. This is where, if I were certain of 'im upstairs', I might raise my two fingers skywards and cry 'Feck you.'