On falling in love

I’ve been thinking about this blog post for a while now and since we’re nearing the two-year anniversary of living in this lovely house, I thought it was high time for me to write about how I fell in love with my roommate.

Yeah, that’s right.

It started with an ad on Craigslist. Actually, two ads. The first one led me to this amazing house two blocks from the ocean — a perfect place to share with my lovely friend G, our two dogs and the kids. Have you ever looked for a place to rent with two dogs and two kids? It is not easy.

All three levels... two blocks from the ocean. Amazing find!

But this place was perfect — the landlord was fine with the dogs, and happy about the kids (he said he felt that folks with kids made more reliable tenants… I almost jumped up and kissed him when I heard those words). It was a bit out of our price range, but it also had an extra bedroom, so we agreed that getting another roommate would be a small price to pay for such an incredible place in an incredible location. What better place to find a roommate than on Craigslist?

As with any Craigslist ads, we had several kooky-sounding responses, and a few decent-sounding ones. I narrowed it down to two: one was a girl working downtown, and the other was a guy MA student. I was leaning towards the girl. G was leaning towards the guy. Deferring to her better judgement, I decided to meet the guy first to check him out. And since G was living out of town, I went on my own to pick him up and show him the place — and to give both of us a chance to get to know each other a little.

Moving in with a stranger is a weird thing, but I’m a big believer in first impressions. My first impression when I pulled up to the corner where he told me to meet him and greeted him as he hopped into my car was: Wow, this guy could be my brother. And then: Or one of my sons, ten years from now.

Do we always instantly like people who look like us? Is it some weird instinctual thing? I’ve always noticed that Little Black Dog seems to have some inner instinct that makes her most interested in other black dogs. In a crowd at the dog park, she will make a beeline for the dog that looks most like her. I must have felt a little like that, because this strange guy almost instantly didn’t seem so strange.

Maybe part of it was LBD’s reaction to him as well. Apologies to those with genuine fear of dogs, but I am always slightly suspicious of the dog-haters. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but a person’s interaction with my dog leaves an impression on me. And this guy, this ice-blue eyed nordic prince of a stranger, was instantly Little Black Dog’s best friend.

Now, I’ll make it clear that in no way did I fall for him right then. No — this was a roommate (I was sold on him as a roomie pretty quickly), and I viewed him with the amused detachment reserved for my students, who, like him, weren’t all that much younger than me but (hot or not) completely off bounds. Besides, I was totally Not Looking For Love. I was just about to start my PhD and had WAY more important things on my mind.

I had more important things on my mind. Like eating my fingers (but there is that cute boy in the background...).

So you can see that in no way did I see it coming. We moved in, and lovely G was a little later in arriving, since she had other things going on. So for that first couple of months, it was mostly just me and The Boy. We hung out a bit, got to know each other. Found out that we had many research interests in common. Found out that we had read much of the same theory, that we both spoke that language. Found out that hanging together was fun. Met each other’s friends. took walks. Cooked dinner. Ate together and drank wine and conversed late into the night. You can see where this is going….

Okay, come on now. Here he is melting my heart with my good friend's baby. How could anyone NOT fall in love here, even just a little?

Soon my amused detachment had begun to disintegrate into butterflies in the stomach whenever he walked into the room. I became acutely aware of our physical proximity — if I was upstairs in my bed, I could almost sense his presence two floors down. When we were in the same room, I noticed us standing closer together than was totally necessary. We seemed to do a lot together. Every day.

Yeah, roommates always cook nice dinners of fresh prawns together, right?

For a while, I wondered if it was totally normal for roommates to be hanging out as much as we were. I mean, after a while I dropped the pretense (to myself) of thinking that I didn’t think he was hot. Clearly, he was hot. It wasn’t just physical hot either, it was everything. But still, I reminded myself, you are five years older than this young buck. You have two kids. One of them is only fifteen years younger than him. He will get bored soon and stop following you around. You better not get heartbroken when that happens.

But somehow it didn’t happen, and we started to write a paper together for a conference, and I allowed myself to fantasize a little about what might happen when we traveled to that conference together, but it still all seemed very naughty and dangerous to even consider. After all, you CANNOT kiss roommates. That is practically the first law of roommate-dom. DON’T KISS THEM. EVER. Why? Something bad will happen. It’s written down through history. Everyone knows this.

Our conference paper, in process. It was a good paper. We may still rewrite it one day.

But then, one day I kissed him. I couldn’t help it, because he kissed me first and it was just so GREAT. And then I wanted to do it again, and it seemed like he wanted to do it again, and I thought to myself, forget about stupid roommate rules (all the while feeling extremely guilty and naughty).

But I was still not in love (or so I told myself). I told myself that it was a summer fling. He would probably get bored and wander off any one of these days. I better get all the kisses I can while it still lasts.

And then, when I kept getting more and more kisses (and great conversations, and laughs, and general fun times) I started to feel a little worried. Because all of a sudden, I couldn’t so flippantly say to myself, never mind, it’s just a summer fling and he will get bored and wander off any one of these days without feeling a big huge sharp pain like a knife stabbing through the centre of me. And I thought, oh crap. I am totally falling in love. That was not a part of the plan.

So you see, I didn’t mean for it to happen. In fact, even while I was doing all that kissing, I was still scolding myself and telling myself Don’t Fall In Love. Just Don’t. And I tried not to do it, really hard. But he didn’t help any either, being all adorable and offering up the kisses for free all the time. And we talked for a while about how maybe we should stop with the kisses and go back to just being roommates, but then in the end we always ended up kissing anyways. Because how could we not? I guess we were just that kissable.

Here he is capivating me with his wit and intelligence. A daily occurence.

Anyway, soon we stopped talking about how we should probably stop with the kisses and we started talking about other stuff. Like about what we wanted to do tomorrow, or next week or next year or in five or ten years. And those plans, they always somehow included the other person (tentatively at first, of course, like — if you want to we could maybe… but only if you wanted to…). And then somehow it turned into two years later, and I cannot imagine life without my Tab A.

And that is how I fell in love.

She is so in love....