Loving life is easy when you are abroad, where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more a master of yourself than at home.
Hannah Arendt
The Work Bestie had been with me my first night in a new place since before he and I were a thing. He’d helped me move into my first place of my own after I left my ex-husband. That first night the Work Bestie stayed the night in my son’s room (while I slept in my own room). When the landlord sold that house, and I had to move, my first night in the new place the Work Bestie slept in my new living room (while I slept in my own room). And again, after we were already a thing, when I moved to northern California for school, he drove us up and stayed that first night, though that time he stayed in my room with me. At this point, I can’t imagine calling a place home before he stays the night there with me.
Our relationship started in the normal way, for me anyway. Through no effort of our own, we ended up spending time together. As a result, we found ourselves getting to know and growing fond of each other. We were flirty. We were friendly. We were friends. We were “friends who flirt.” Life happened. We grew closer. We grew apart. At some point, we were both single. We grew closer again. He was calling me more often. I really liked those calls. I kept urging him to visit me. He kept visiting. And seemingly inevitably, we ended up fooling around.
Fooling around with a friend is nice; you know and trust them. It’s also awful, in that there’s something to lose and no graceful exit if it ends badly. Neither one of us wanted to make it public or official. Not in the first couple of months. I didn’t want our mutual colleagues and friends to know about it if we fooled around for a minute and then one or both of us wanted to return to just friends. I wanted to be able to pretend it had never happened if he wasn’t going to be a significant other of some significance. Nobody wants to add embarrassment to pain. We discreetly transitioned from “friends who flirt” to “friends who fool around.”
Eventually, I let myself exhale a bit. It wasn’t an incident, it was a relationship. I mean, maybe not a permanent relationship, but it doesn’t have to be forever to be for real. I reluctantly accepted that I wasn’t saving myself any pain or embarrassment by the technicality of not sleeping with him. About six months into fooling around and about six years into knowing each other, I decided I was finally ready to go all the way. Whatever this was between us, it wasn’t going away soon.
He had been my rock for so long. He had been my one-man moving crew months after my legal separation when I moved from my friend’s house to a place of my own in 2016. He had been my most steadfast emotional support during my dad’s declining health, hospitalizations, and eventual death in 2017. That’s when we started fooling around, in 2017, a few months after I lost my dad. I mark my anniversary with the Work Bestie as that first time we fooled around in November 2017. I just didn’t figure out that we were a thing until May of 2018.
Like most relationships, we’ve had our ups and downs. There were times when he was so distant I would’ve dumped him if I could have gotten a hold of him. He wasn’t easy to be in a relationship with, but he has a way of making it up to you just before you give up on him entirely. In all fairness, I’m not a cakewalk myself. I was so skittish about getting trapped in anything but also deeply afraid of being abandoned. Still, through so much, somehow we endured.
By the time I was packing for Portugal, I was frustrated with our lack of a label but content with our relationship. I was more than content. I had the trademark arrogance of the happily coupled. I felt a little sad for all of my single friends. I wished they could know the joy of being booed up. I felt a little sad for most of my not-single friends, too, knowing in my heart of hearts that their boo couldn’t hold a candle to my bae.
Shortly before Portugal, I tried to put a label on it. When normal people want to talk about their significant other, they can say, “Oh, my partner introduced me to such and such….” I, on the other hand, could say, “Oh, yeah, I know about that because my best friend/colleague, who I’ve been in a monogamous unofficial relationship with for the last few years, told me about that.” It was a mouthful, to say the least. I’d tried calling him my Cootie Buttbrain, “Yeah, my Cootie Buttbrain was totally into that for a while.” That seemed to invite more questions than it answered. If only there were a word for a person you’re not engaged or married to but are in a serious, long-term, monogamous relationship with. Oh, wait.
I don’t know why I was so nervous; more than four years into a relationship and nearly a decade into our friendship, I just wanted to call him my boyfriend. I’d had my own reservations about the relationship and then about the dignity, or lack thereof, of a woman of my age talking about someone as her “boyfriend” when it sounds like such a young person’s relationship status. But as mentioned above, the alternatives were much more awkward.
During his visit right before my trip, I tried to bring up the idea of putting a label on it. It was so silly at this point that we hadn’t. But I was nervous and awkward, and I was making it weird. So I sort of threw it out there saying that we should put a label on it, but when he seemed confused, I backpedaled like nobody’s business. Nothing to see here, folks. I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to like her unless he doesn’t feel like liking her because that’s totally fine too, she doesn’t even really like being liked anyway, and it would probably be best if we just never mention this again. Something like that anyway.
So we didn’t officially put a label on it, but that didn’t change what we were. I mean, there were still some logistical concerns between us and Forever. That didn’t change that I was in love with my best friend. We had been some kind of romantic, sexual, monogamous thing for four and a half years. He was the person who already knew all the backstories so I could dive straight into the today-story when I had one to tell. He was the person who could talk me off of any ledge. He was who I leaned on. He was my person.
I’d totally fumbled talking to him about it but, while I was in Portugal, thousands of miles away, talking to people he would never meet, I starting calling him my boyfriend. And you know what? The world didn’t end. Nobody gave me any side eye or asked if I wasn’t too old to have a “boyfriend.” I loved how that one word seemed to cover everything that the average person wanted to know about us. Maybe we would be together forever. Maybe we wouldn’t. But finally calling him my boyfriend felt really right, even if I hadn’t managed to tell him about it yet.
But if the world was ending
JP Saxe and Julia Michaels
you’d come over, right?
You’d come over and you’d stay the night
Would you love me for the hell of it?
All our fears would be irrelevant
If the world was ending
you’d come over, right?
The sky’d be falling while I hold you tight
No, there wouldn’t be a reason why
we would even have to say goodbye