On Love & Trying

The way January dragged on, it blows my mind that it is already nearly mid-February. How and when did that happen?!

Today is my ninth wedding anniversary! That’s wild, to me. Not because of anything bad, but just because if you’d told teenaged Marie that someday she’d have someone who loves her fully, let alone a stable job she loves, owns a house, and gets to be a mom to the most amazing child, she never would have believed you. Daniel and I met Sept 8, 2013 and by late October, I knew I was going to marry him – and I even emailed a friend on 11/11/13 to tell them that!

I know we don’t always get it right – me, especially. I come with a lot of heavy stuff. But I’m glad we found each other in the dance of Fetlife photo comments and that he took the chance to DM me. Falling in love with Daniel has changed my life. He makes me want to be the best version of me and he makes me want to always strive for getting it right, even when I fall short. Maybe especially then. Most importantly, we may not always get it right but we’re here, we’re present, we know communication is important, and we’ll figure it out. We are both children of divorce, perhaps that makes us hyper vigilant. At the end of the day, love alone is never enough. Partnership is mutual work, an active choice, of which love and respect and reliance, are the fruits of that labor.

We didn’t have a big wedding because we were young and poor students. We got married on the coldest day of the year at the NYC Marriage Bureau (courthouse wedding), February 12, 2016 with just 13 immediate family members and friends-who-are-family. I didn’t have classes that day and it was a Friday, so that’s how we picked the date. We had a delicious family style lunch at Carmine’s on the UWS and a cake, went home to decompress, change and grab our bags and crashed into a hotel bed after having Thai food for dinner. It was perfectly us. For our 10 year anniversary next year we are hoping to do a vow renewal and take an indulgent trip together, like a long cruise or something.

That said, I’ve especially been distant in all my relationships, lately – for all the reason I’ve written about, this week and before. One thing I did in early January, for a lot of reasons – to protect myself emotionally and also in an attempt to respect a request from a friend, was deactivate all my kink social media, including Twitter and Bluesky (and Fetlife). Unfortunately, I’m unwilling to delete things from those spaces that would fully respect this persons request so I felt deactivating was best – however, the negative impact of the isolation from my community, was too great. So I returned to Twitter & Bluesky this week. I am going to keep my Fetlife deactivated for now. There’s something about only being willing to extend so much of my own consideration in a situation where no one is being considerate of me and my wellbeing is important, too. I’ve spent a lot of the last month+ thinking about this so it’s not something I do lightly.

I am hoping that a return to this sense of community, will help me reconnect with this part of me, and ultimately, have me feeling more like me because the version of me I am living with right now, is unsustainable. Getting back to that sense of myself will get me back to the people I care about. I have to try at this point. Active work.

Also, the “traditional” 9th wedding anniversary gift is tin/aluminum, but the “modern” one is leather. Good thing I got this small leather hairbrush paddle from Adam & Gillian a few months ago after we talked about some of his preferences. I’ve been saving it. We have so few toys acquired together, this is a special thing.

-M