I never anticipated the twists and turns that would lead me to this point in my life, but I’m thankful for the opportunities and lessons I have gotten to experience along the way. They are what laid the ground-work for where I am now. If we are going to build any sort of bond between you and I on the subjects to come, it’s best you know a little bit about me and that ground-work that came before. So let’s begin at the beginning….
Before the polyamory, parties, hook-ups, google calendars, boyfriends, relationship agreements, day glo paint…(the list goes on) I was a mildly confused, quiet, and shy architecture student. (To be clear all of those things are still true, now I’m just confused about different things.) For all the gay porn I watched. Starting from the very first time I discovered it. After I learned my parents online account password as a pre-teen (they wrote it on a piece of paper and forgot they did) and then covertly changed my own account settings in the dead of night, till well into college. It would takes years of frustration and agonizing internal dialogue before I would come to accept myself for being gay. While it does not define all of me, it is very much an integral part to whom I am. I’ll save the details of my coming-out for another post for now. That is not to say it is unimportant, for many (including myself) it is an integral part of learning to accept who you are. This post is about a different chapter, however, and so we shall fast forward, just a tiny bit.
Let us return to that shy & quiet architecture boy we have left waiting patiently in the wings. He enters scene left, heartbroken and drowning in school & work. Well, mostly work, it was summer break after all. He had nothing to do, but wallow in his own heartbreak over a recent break-up. A break-up that happened to be his very first boyfriend, but not relationship (I did say a tiny bit). The whole affair was messy and painful. There might have even been some ugly crying, which although he looks…well its ugly crying, no looks pretty doing that. Heartbroken as he was, his determination would keep him moving forward, as he sought to figure out the whole gay dating thing. That was not an easy feat turns out. Keeping in mind our hero of this (current) tragedy is shy and quiet, almost to the point of running the other direction should a cute guy even looks his way, face-to-face interactions were essentially out of the question. Instead he would turn to the internet. Not Grindr, Grindr didn’t work on flip phones. No, instead he turned to that antiquated form of dating, a dating website.
The idea came from a previous evening spent mending the broken heart of a dear & close friend. Inspired in their wallowing by a commercial pontificating the virtues of a particular online dating site, they had begun to fill out online profiles in hopes of finding ‘the one’. Turns out her ‘one’s’ name was Luke, his ‘one’s’ name was “we’re sorry, please try a different site’. (See? Tragedy.). He ventured out in search of other platforms and new beginnings, undeterred by those initial abysmal results. He would stumble several times in the course of his endeavour, but slowly, slowly, things would come together. He eventually would find a dating site that met his needs. After several failed attempts and one poorly matched date, he would chance upon someone unique and charming. Someone who would help to define the next decade of his life (and still counting). The Fiancé.
Now like all good romances this one started out with some serious cheese. I know because the Fiancé is a nerd, our hero was a newly-minted awkward gay, and 10 years later I have read those conversations and they are truly & adorkably cringe worthy. There’s talk of pasta and swimming and clarinet playing. (That was actual clarinet playing for those with more salacious minds. I’m a proper gentleman so long as the lights are at least dimly lit.) Whatever it was, it spoke to our hero’s heart and pulled on all the right strings. There would be a touching first date that is often regaled upon unsuspecting new acquaintances even now. Though the version changes depending on who’s telling the tale. In short, I come out looking like the cute & shy guy I am, and the Fiancé gets to play the role of Knight in Shining Armor, who sweeps in right at the closing scene and steals a tender and cautious kiss from the lips of his soon to be prince. The date would leave our college boy breathless and texting constantly (and annoyingly often) for the next 6 mos. The fact that he even has a fiancé at all to this day boggles the mind.
Fast forward now to a few years into our hero’s new relationship. The once tragic protagonist is no longer pining for lost love, but reveling in his current one. The intervening time has been spent learning to navigate becoming a ‘we’, moving in with the (then) Boyfriend, and attempting to jump start a budding architecture career. Anyone of those items alone is enough to send a sane person running, but there he was doing them all of them at once. Poor fool. Over this duration of time many a discussion had taken place. One common thread that had come up consistently was a love for California. San Francisco in particular. Both our hero & the Boyfriend loved the city and the idea of moving there some day. Neither had any clue of how they would get there, but neither was deterred by that fact either. They had even taken several trips. Doing all the quintessential touristy bits, In-&-Out, Lombard Street, walking the Golden Gate bridge… They could both see themselves living in the Bay area, they just need an opportunity to do so.
The opportunity would come in the form of a job offer. You see the Boyfriend worked for a fairly well-known corporation with headquarters in the Bay Area. As luck would have it, he was the smarter of the two of them & had secured a career opportunity in the company’s home office. What started as a three-month assignment, protracted into a five month one, and eventually an actual job offer. Our hero was quite surprised when he came home from his week-long vacation with his family and the first words out of the Boyfriend’s mouth were “Want to move to San Francisco?” He would have also accepted “Hello! I’ve missed you! I haven’t seen you in 5 months!” or “You look tanner!”, but an offer to move was just as good in his opinion. Regardless the reintroductions, five months after setting off for the west coast our couple was reunited and soon to be on the move once again. What had started as a tragedy in this post so long ago would materialize into the beginnings of a grand adventure for our college boy. Neither of the two could have anticipated what the West Coast would hold in store for them. Their move truly, was only the beginning.
