He May Surprise You

I've been picking fights with my boyfriend. He noticed. This is a sequel to "The Inevitable End". Out of my frustration from being convinced that he would drop me the moment I started to self-actualize, even just with name and presentation, I wanted to draw him into a fight about it. I didn't want to try it first. I wanted him to admit it. I wanted it to be his fault that it was all over.

Then one night he confronted me about picking fights with him. I had been conscious that I had been distant, perhaps cold even, but when I was faced with the harsh truth of my combativeness, I felt ashamed. I admitted to it. I admitted it was my fault. I told him why I was so dour, so pessimistic. I felt like he was holding my identity hostage to this relationship. I wasn't ready for the fight yet, I had expected it to happen later, but to all appearances, it seemed like it was happening now.

What he told me next shocked me. He told me that not being able to introduce me as his boyfriend was his failing. He told me he was sorry.

I had been so ready for him to defend his sexuality, I was so ready to be angry at him, and it turns out that the very thing I'd been wanting to shout in his face, he'd been thinking all along. I'd underestimated him in a big way.

I know we're still a long way from being out and proud together, that he's a long way from going from two decades of straight-dating to being in an openly gay relationship, in the eyes of friends who have seen him trip through a string of cis-women for all that time. I can't allow myself to hope that he will ever reach that point, if he admits to being unsure now. But it's still a considerable improvement from assuming that we're already doomed.

He says that the closest concession he can conceive of being able to make right now is to make introductions as "this is M, the person I love." It's sort of odd that such a sentence should seem so awkward; why don't we talk about the person we love? Why must gender always be assigned? Girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife... all gender-delineated. Fascinatingly the only standard American gender-neutral romantic partner word is originally French: fiancée. Maybe I'm just weird, but I really wouldn't mind introducing my significant other as, "this is X, X is my person". I think everyone would get what I was talking about.