Blogs are a fascinating medium. They are like a diary, but everyone in the world can read them. We send them to our friends and invite them to read them. Jimmy and I have both met people who read our blogs and don’t know us from anywhere else. There are things I write here that even my closest friends and family might never know because I simply don’t have time to tell them all. I often (is this awful, or just sensible?) catch myself telling them to read the blog. I mean, I’ll answer the question they’ve asked but I also feel that I already worked to hone the story to just the meaningful parts in a coherent way so read it and then if you still want to spend the time we have together honing that down even more then we might get more juice out of the conversation.
On that note there are people in my life who don’t know a lot about Jimmy and how we came to be here together. Certainly there are people who read the blog, who’ve never even met us, who don’t know. So I decided to write about him because I’m a relationship coach so I imagine you wonder, and because he is often the splendor.
Jimmy is a 32 year old artist originally from Milwaukee and lately from San Diego. We met on the internet. I was looking for someone fun to do stuff with until I left for Italy. We built a relationship together with intention and purpose and we decided to create this adventure together.
My friend Linda often says to me, if I complain about anything in her presence, that I should be happy because at least at the end of a bad day, I have Jimmy. It irritates me when she says that, but she is right. As I move along this path having a gentle, caring and patient partner makes the whole thing that much easier to manage. Not just because he is a warm hand to hold and he does more than his share of heavy lifting when there are things we need to do, but because he makes me laugh. Every day, most of the day. Sometimes, if we want to get anything done we have to separate ourselves, like my mother used to do when my sister and I were too wound up about something to sleep. We play and laugh together all day long and it lightens my heart like nothing else.
Jimmy and I are here together because we share some very deeply held values. Above all things we each value Experience and Learning. We aren’t adventure seekers, though we may encounter adventure. There are many things about us that are different and we treasure those differences. Still, if you took a list of each of our top 20 most deeply held values, there would be very few that didn’t match, though likely scaled differently.
When we go to pick things out for our new apartment we often have very similar tastes. When, on rare occasion, we differ I find myself a tiny bit irritated because I’ve gotten used to it being easy and the small amount of work it takes to get us on the same page seems suddenly unreasonable.
Jimmy reads things I don’t. I read things he doesn’t. We've led very different lives. We talk a lot about what we know, think, feel and believe from our very separate perspectives. It allows us to show up as individuals. Many couples have, or perhaps believe they have, the same opinions and thoughts about the world. I imagine that makes it really boring, perhaps even unnecessary, to have conversation over dinner. Jimmy has been one of my greatest teachers and he calls me his teacher as well.
So there you are. We care about the same things, we like the same things, we are interested in one another, we laugh a lot, we share burdens, and, (this is the best part I think) he regularly dances me around the living room in my bare feet and every time I feel completely loved and safe.
