My April Valentine

My nine-year anniversary was either eight months ago or one month from now depending upon how you count or whom you speak with. In honour of that dubious distinction, I thought I’d share a mushy story with you about the first time I said the L-word to a guy you all know as Hubby.

Some of you that haven’t known me long may not know that I was once what some would call a man-hating, personal space loving, b!tch. And that was on a good day. I had debates in classes that ranged from math to religion about how love was a myth perpetuated only to support procreation. My quote in my senior yearbook was: “Don’t touch me. You’re on my side of the planet.” Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly the girl voted most likely to fall in love with some random guy she met online, get married, and move to the developing world.

Now that you know the background, allow me to briefly tell you about Hubby’s first visit to Toronto where he put the moves on me, said “I love you” first, and left me wondering what was next. Hmm. Ok. Put that way, that’s the entire part of the story you need to know.

By the time I arrived at my dorm in Halifax, a birthday gift bunny (soon to be named Fuzz Butt) was waiting for me. Hubby and I spoke on the phone or online via IRC just about every day but there was no pressure for me to reciprocate his L-Word announcement (I may or may not have been attending classes in-between chats, but seeing as it was still the beginning of the year chances are good I was still going regularly).

Around mid-September, after several debates with my friends, Fuzz, and some of my other personalities, I called Hubby up for one of our usual chats. After about an hour of talking I told him I had something important to talk to him about. “I love you!” I said quickly. I then hung up and left the phone off the hook so he couldn’t call me back.

I left the phone off the hook for about an hour until I was mentally ready to talk to him. And then I got pissed off because my lack of voice mails proved that he obviously hadn’t tried to call me back. That jerk!

My natural next step was to email him a very long, very emotional email about my feelings and why I would never share with him again (Not because he didn’t call back but because I wasn’t the mushy, holding hands kind of a girl). After rereading it to make sure that my views on mushiness were clear, I hit send.

If She of the Gratuitous H is reading this, she’ll remember what happened next. I didn’t send it to Hubby. In a fit of idiocy, I sent my mushy email to her by accident. Hoping to fix my mistake, I quickly emailed her back and begged her not to read my first email. Since H teases me about it to this day, she obviously did read it and enjoys mocking me for it.

The denouement to this story is that eventually Hubby and I spoke and he admitted that he was rather flabbergasted by my admission the night before and hadn’t even tried to call me back. (The pig!) And then he invited himself to visit me in Halifax for Canadian Thanksgiving where he finally said it back (again).

And the rest is history. I am now a mushy girl who says things like the L-Word and hold hands and still thinks her husband is a pig – but the cute, snuggly kind. Basically saying the L-word changed everything. And that’s ok.