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I Fell in Love — and I Miss the Crush
He loves me back. The only problem is, now what?
A beautiful man is sitting in front of me, telling me he’s fallen in love.
Instinctively, I want to look over my shoulder — to see who he’s really talking to. We’re alone, of course, and I’m the person he’s come to see. I’m the person he’s talking to —the person he’s fallen in love with, and he’s no stranger. I know him well, in fact. We met a year ago. We’ve spoken almost every day, safely developing a friendship under the assumption that this was all that could happen, since we both have partners. All this time, what I kept dismissing as ‘a crush’ — anticipating each casual sighting of him with giddy thoughtlessness — had been turning into something else. Now, there was no denying it.
Something in our beings has been transparently open to each other since the beginning.
I think about denying it, for a second. I think about dismissing my feelings — but I don’t. I don’t like lying, or playing games — and anyway, he’s so attuned to me that it wouldn’t work. He’d only lose respect for me, and I can’t bear that. The reality of the love between us has become obvious to both — so obvious that he confessed his to me with the relaxed confidence of someone who knows his feelings are reciprocated. Something in our beings has been transparently open to each other since the beginning: we can’t squash each other, can’t deny each other, would never want to hurt one another.
I nod: “I’m in love with you too”, and slowly breathe out — as if I’d been holding my breath for a year.
Now what?
Since this exchange between us, two months ago, I’ve been in a state of inner turmoil. We haven’t even kissed: though we are in open relationships, the strength of our feelings for each other is making us careful. We’re moving slowly, negotiating our commitments, feeling into the effects of our love on the space around us.
My emotions switch from one day to the next. There’s joy, of course: to love and be loved in return has brought me alive and comforted the inner child in me who longs to be seen and wanted. Then fear: not simply of the disruption this brings to my…
