D&C 25

When I sat down to write this post, I thought I was going to talk about the seeds this revelation contains for envisioning priestly roles for women in the Church. But then my eye fell on a question in the student guide—"How can spouses show that they delight in each other?"—and that word "delight" suddenly gave me that heart-lifting moved-by-the-Spirit feeling. So totally impromptu, I feel moved to say something about the delight I experience in my relationship with my partner.

Hugo and I have been together since Thanksgiving 1999. That was the day we moved our friendship, which had built up slowly over the previous year-and-a-half or so, into a romance. And having gotten that far into this paragraph, I'm really unsure how to proceed. How do I describe this relationship? The attraction is primarily intellectual, I'd say. I am deeply in love with Hugo's mind... which isn't to say the relationship isn't physical, too, though I'll refrain from further comment in that department. I will say this: I remember how exciting it was the first time he reached out to hold my hand. We were driving in the car the day after Thanksgiving, on the way to visit a friend of his. Our friendship had built up gradually over the past year-and-a-half or so. We were so compatible in terms of our intellectual interests. I wanted so badly to have him as my partner. But I'd gotten to a point where I'd accepted that wasn't going to happen; we were just going to be friends... and then the thrilling surprise when he made that first move in the car to take my hand. That was a moment of delight for my soul.

Gads this writing is agonizingly difficult. I don't know what to say without lapsing into cliché. All right, fine, screw it—cliché time: I can't imagine life without Hugo. I feel so grateful that God brought him into my life. I'm so grateful that we live at a time and place where we can make a life together without the secrecy of the closet. I'm grateful he came with me to North Carolina. I worry about the future. The inability to marry makes our situation precarious. We desperately need to draw up wills and powers of attorney and so on—but we can't afford it right now, and anyway those kinds of documents don't necessarily remain valid when you move from one state to another. There are a lot of practical issues we have to work out eventually. It's overwhelming to think about.

But I was supposed to be talking about the "delight." Not to sound mercenary about it, but at a practical level, my partnership with Hugo makes the organization of my life a lot easier in terms of distribution of labor—things like shopping, seeing that bills are paid. Again, I hope that doesn't sound mercenary, but it's an important way that Hugo supports me as I work and study. And I hope he feels adequately supported by me. Hugo's not big on talking about feelings—he's somewhat stereotypically masculine in that regard—so I don't always quite know where we stand as transparently as I would like. But we're together, and things feel like they're working. Certainly this relationship has been easier than other partnerships I've attempted in the past. We're very compatible. We fit well together. And we're coming up on 10 years together. I thank God for that.

Okay, this was lame. But it is what it is.