In a relationship. . .

For the first time in years, I'm in a relationship with the Starving Artist which has lasted for months and feels really good. I don't want to keep calling him SA because that's too labeling, so I will call him Jon. We're not yet calling each other "boyfriend" and "girlfriend", but it almost doesn't matter. He calls me practically every night, and stops by many evenings after work since I'm conveniently on the way. Jon's reassured me that any hesitations he has about being a couple are because he's never been part of a couple before, nothing to do with me. So we're doing everything slowly. And I think we're both really happy. And definitely happier than we had been alone.

I went back to a dating site to find the profile of a friend of mine to send to someone, and caught up on my inbox, and WOW I'm so grateful not to have to deal with that right now. And I hope not to go back to it. My inbox was the usual mixture of inarticulate and/or really far away, usually both. One guy endeared me to him because his profile made me laugh and he was located 45 minutes away, and I started thinking about whether he and my friends would get along, but then I realized that was all he had in common, so I just told him where my friends go when they say they don't see any guys our age.

Then, on a different dating site, so went back to those to reply (I feel like that's owed rather than letting things go into the ether.) And it was again much of the same: inarticulate, far away, nothing in common. One or two made me laugh and seemed appropriate, but only in comparison to the others being such bad matches. I can see these dates playing out.

(Though I have to admit that if I hadn't met Jon in person, I may not have thought we had much in common. Though it depends what he wrote on his profile.)

All in all, I'm conscious about making this relationship work in a few ways. Most important is following the "best practices" for communication, and not doing everything I've ever done wrong in a relationship, and amazingly I am.

Second of all, sex. Several months ago, I read a book about a couple that had sex every day for a month, even though many times they weren't interested in it beforehand, and it seemed like it really brought them together for all the expected hormonal reasons, and I learned a lot from that book.

Third, weight. I'm 5 pounds over my usual weight, about half of the weight still remaining from the going-off-antidepressants gain last spring, and I'm working on getting back down to my usual weight, and then hopefully down another 7 pounds. Mostly because I want my clothes to fit and to be firmly in the normal BMI range since right now I'm just above the maximum "normal" weight. But partially because I am almost certain he would prefer it. I'm doing the flax oil thing --- 2 T flax oil in unsweetened soy milk, shaken --- to reduce appetite, and it's actually working. Plus various kinds of interval training.

So it's really nice. I feel really lucky, and I hope always to see the good side of this relationship rather than looking for flaws in it, most of which involve money. And at this point, money is not important, and the quantities of money involved are relatively trivial. If for some reason we both had to live on my flimsy postdoc stipend, we could. The important part is that he has all the right impulses in terms of not wanting to have a financial inequality in the relationship since at some point of course it could become a point of stress if he doesn't feel like he's contributing.

It's great to have good news here for once. Most of my dating posts were just complaints. I realize that this post risks Murphy's Law that the relationship will end because I felt good enough about the relationship to post this.