Living With Your Lover

“Lover” is a pretty repulsive noun, and I wouldn’t normally use it except in cases of extreme sarcasm. But boyfriend just doesn’t seem to cut it and manfriend is a little too lame. For a while I toyed with the term partner, which evokes memories of picturesque cowboys and political hippies (worst kind), not to mention the fact that people just assume I’m a lesbian if I call anyone a “partner.” Which is another thing. Because that’s the point right? That people shouldn’t be worried about the gender and/or sex of my partner, and I shouldn’t have to label people in these ways? And really, who am I to care if others think my boyfriend is actually a lady? Maybe he would care, but I don’t. So, on we go.

Living with your lover is not hard. Let’s face it. People suck, and that’s what’s hard. It turns out that everyone is more selfish than they’d actually lead you to believe, but once you live with another person you learn that really you both suck, and that’s that. This is not an attempt to beguile you and I am not in  any position to give out serious love advice, since my relationship sort of fell into my lap after years of dating other, okay-but-not-really-my-type-men. But since people are easily shocked, or at least feign shocked-ness whenever I tell them how long Zack and I have been together and how long we’ve lived together, I’ve finally decided to address living with your lover (and why it’s not hard).

Having the best time, best time.

For the past two years, I have lived with Zack in a 395 square foot studio. And we just signed the lease for another year. Before this charming little—I’m serious about little—studio, Zack and I lived in a house with some of our closest friends (which was hard, but not nearly as hard as the time before that). People always ask me something along the lines of “how do you get away” or “don’t you need personal space,” or anything like that which suggests that people don’t realize how busy we both are.