family – The Light Beyond Longing

Christmas Eve 2020 was the busiest day of my working year. Normally, it would have been impossible to give anything else much attention, with important tasks to complete and an impossible long list of things that needed doing before Christmas could properly begin.

But somehow, Stephen and I managed to keep talking all day.

Messages flew back and forth between us whenever I had a spare moment. Each one seemed to open another door into the other’s life, and beneath the practicalities of my busy day, we were quietly assessing the chemistry between us.

There was definitely a spark.

Our communication seemed to work effortlessly. We shared a similar sense of humour and enjoyed playing with ideas, and the more we talked, the more common ground we discovered. We were beginning to recognise similarities in our pasts, but perhaps more excitingly, we were discovering that some of our hopes for the future weren’t so different either.

It was during those conversations that I learned my first surprising fact about Stephen.

He wasn’t actually a property developer.

He confessed that he had listed it on his dating profile because, although property development was something he aspired to, it sounded considerably better than putting ‘unemployed’ on his profile.

It was, technically, a lie.

It raised an eyebrow.

But I also appreciated that he had told me himself, rather than allowing me to continue believing something that wasn’t true. He was remarkably open about other aspects of his life, and I could understand the embarrassment behind wanting to present yourself in a better light when entering the dating world. I decided not to make too much of it.

There were more important things I was discovering about him.

Stephen spoke warmly about his previous girlfriend, describing her as a lovely and kind woman but explaining that, despite those qualities, he couldn’t see a future with her.

I remember finding that refreshing.

There was something reassuring about hearing a man speak kindly about an ex-partner rather than dismissing her or turning her into the villain of his story. It suggested a degree of maturity and compassion that I found attractive.

Then Stephen told me something else.

He had EUPD — Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder.

He suggested that it had developed as a consequence of something traumatic during his childhood, although he didn’t tell me what had happened. I didn’t push him. We’d only known each other for a day, and there were some things that I felt belonged to a later conversation, if and when we got to know each other properly.

I listened carefully, though.

I was aware enough to understand that entering a relationship with someone who had a significant mental health diagnosis could bring its own complexities. I wondered what it might mean for him, and potentially for me, if our relationship developed.

But at that point, what stood out more strongly than the diagnosis was his apparent openness about it.

He seemed self-aware. He wasn’t hiding it or pretending that everything in his life had always been straightforward. There was something quite compelling about that honesty.

I suspected that whatever had happened in his childhood had been serious, possibly involving abuse, but I didn’t need to know everything immediately.

There was plenty about Stephen that I found fascinating already.

My curiosity about him was stronger than my reservations.

We talked about the sort of lives we imagined having one day. Stephen dreamed of owning some woodland and creating a self-sufficient life for himself. I had rather more modest ambitions.

I simply wanted a lovely home to come back to after a day’s work.

Somewhere I could feel safe. Somewhere I could feel secure. Somewhere I could build a happy life.

When we talked about it, neither dream seemed incompatible with the other.

In fact, they seemed as though they might fit surprisingly well.

It was far too soon to be imagining a future with a man I’d met on a dating app only the day before, and I was perfectly aware of that.

But it was difficult not to entertain the possibility.

Something exciting and, perhaps, surprisingly realistic seemed to be taking shape.

That evening, I think we had our first telephone conversation.

Until then, Stephen had existed as words on a screen and a handful of photographs. Suddenly, there was a voice attached to him.

I loved it instantly.

It was quite low and textured, with a slightly silky quality that I found incredibly attractive. There was something almost contradictory about the way he spoke — occasionally quite polished and almost posh, then suddenly dropping into much more ordinary, familiar pronunciations.

And when I made him laugh, he would giggle.

Not a restrained, self-conscious laugh, but something much more childlike and spontaneous.

I found it adorable.

Hearing his voice made the attraction I’d already felt through our messages grow stronger. There was something about Stephen that seemed to combine confidence with an almost boyish naivety, and I found the combination irresistible.

It was Christmas Eve.

The timing somehow made everything feel even more exciting. There was something wonderfully surreal about being on the threshold of Christmas, surrounded by all the usual preparations, while at the same time beginning something completely unexpected with a man I’d only just met.

I was already pretty hooked.

I wanted to know more about him. I wanted to hear his voice again. I wanted to see where this extraordinary conversation might lead.

But I also knew that the next couple of days would probably put everything temporarily on hold.

Christmas was here.

For the moment, I had to put my phone down, finish my work and get on with the festivities.

I had no idea then that the conversation I’d started just a few days earlier would become the beginning of a relationship that would change my life.

For now, it was simply Christmas Eve, and I was excited about a man I had only just met.

When I think about the woman who opened that message now, I don’t think of her as vulnerable in the way the word is often used. I wasn’t broken, desperate or searching for somebody to rescue me. I had already survived the ending of a long relationship and, although I was lonely, I was looking forward.

I wanted love again.

Perhaps more importantly, I still believed I was good at it.

I thought patience was one of my strengths. I was proud of my capacity to understand another person, to forgive mistakes, to work through difficulties rather than walking away from them. Fifteen years in a mostly loving relationship had taught me that lasting love wasn’t something that simply happened to you. It required compromise, generosity and the willingness to remain curious about another person’s experience.

Those were qualities I valued in myself.

I couldn’t have known then that our greatest strengths can become complicated things when they meet the wrong circumstances. Patience can sometimes keep us waiting long after something has begun to hurt. Empathy can encourage us to search for explanations when perhaps we should be looking more closely at behaviour. Forgiveness can be beautiful, but without change on the other side of it, it can become permission to try again.

I knew none of that when Steve appeared on my screen.

What I did know was that I wanted something different from what I had just left behind. I wanted companionship and excitement, but I also wanted security. I wanted someone settled. Someone who knew what he wanted. Someone with whom I wouldn’t have to struggle quite so hard to build an ordinary life.

And before Steve had written a single word to me, I had already begun constructing a version of him.

It wasn’t foolish. We all do it.

A handful of photographs and a dating profile can only provide fragments, so the mind supplies the rest. I saw intelligence, humour and adventure. I saw someone attractive and interesting. I saw a property developer and translated that into independence and stability. I imagined yoga and healthy food from photographs that had never actually promised me either.

Psychologists sometimes talk about projection in much more complicated circumstances, but there is an ordinary version of it too. When information is incomplete, we fill the spaces with our own expectations, preferences and hopes.

Steve was doing exactly the same thing with me.

I sometimes wonder what he imagined when he looked at my photographs.

What did he think I might offer him?

Perhaps he simply thought I was attractive and interesting. Perhaps, after his own experiences, he was lonely too. Perhaps there was something about my warmth or enthusiasm that felt particularly inviting. Perhaps neither of us was doing anything more psychologically interesting than two single people becoming unexpectedly excited about each other.

I don’t want hindsight to steal that possibility from us.

Because something genuine happened during those first conversations. Whatever difficulties came later, I don’t believe the connection I felt existed only in my imagination. We were fascinated by each other. We made each other laugh. We wanted to know more.

And there is something intoxicating about being wanted by somebody you had already decided was unlikely to want you.

Only days earlier, dating had left me wondering whether I was attractive enough, interesting enough, perhaps simply enough. Then the man I considered least likely to respond wasn’t merely interested; he seemed exceptionally interested.

Of course that affected me.

His attention didn’t manufacture my attraction to him, but it amplified it. After the ambiguity and disappearing acts of the men before him, Steve’s enthusiasm felt wonderfully uncomplicated.

Here was someone who wasn’t making me guess.

Or so I thought.

Looking back, I’m interested in how quickly we began exchanging pieces of ourselves. There is an intimacy peculiar to meeting online: two strangers can reveal things through a screen that might take considerably longer to emerge across a table. By the time you finally stand in front of each other, you can feel as though you’re meeting somebody you already know.

But knowing about someone and knowing them are very different things.

At that point, neither Steve nor I could possibly know who the other would become inside a relationship. We knew the stories we told about ourselves. We knew what we hoped for. We knew what attracted us.

Everything else would have to reveal itself slowly.

There is a temptation, knowing what I know now, to return to those first messages searching for clues—to identify the moment when I should have known better.

I don’t want to tell the story that way.

There was no reason for the woman sitting with her phone on 23 December 2020 to know where any of this was going.

She had met an interesting man.

He seemed equally interested in her.

And she was excited.

The things that would eventually become difficult to understand had not happened yet.

For now, there were simply two strangers on opposite sides of a screen, each imagining the person they might have found.

And neither of us yet knew how much those imaginings would matter.

Tag: family

Getting To Know Stephen

The Beginning (REFLECTION)