How do you tell the difference, for sure?
I’m thinking of myself, of course, and my partner. We started off as friends, then best friends, then just… fell for each other.
It’s new and beautiful and interesting and it’s something I’ve never felt before with another person. I’m a very cautious person and fairly closed-off, not terribly emotional or romantic, and definitely not very trusting. I’m also not likely to express this sort of thing about or to another person, in general. So when I found her, it was like something was lifted from me. I felt both like I suddenly understood what all these humans were talking about in songs and poetry and like I was experiencing something new to the world that nobody could quite understand. She gets me. She knows me. I allow her to know me in ways that I never thought I’d allow anyone to know me. And I love everything about her and understand her in a way I don’t think anyone does. It’s like we’re two members of the same alien species finally finding one of our kind.
The problem is the outside world. Mostly, our parents.
First of all, the fact that we’re two chicks doesn’t help matters at all. Neither of us are exactly out-and-proud gays. She is more than I am, but she’s bisexual and tends to prefer guys. But she had her baby’s dad on speakerphone the other day (he’s on better terms than she is with her parents, for some reason. It’s very weird.) and was asking him what her parents’ problem was with her and if it was me. He waffled and she pressed- “do they have a problem with Dorothy?” The answer was yes- they thought we were becoming codependent and that our relationship was unhealthy.
I don’t think it is, but I grant that it’s a possibility. For her to be happy is one of the best things I can imagine. And when I have the chance, I try to make it so. I miss her when she’s gone and think I would be seriously upset if anything were to happen to her. But it’s not that I have to have her approval on everything or can’t live outside of her, or that she can’t for me. There’s nothing destructive about this, as far as I can tell. Part of what makes it work is that what we both want is each other’s genuine happiness. Her taking care of herself makes me happy and vice versa.
The problem is, I’ve never felt like this before. I’ve never been so close to somebody in my life and don’t actually know what it’s supposed to feel like to be in love, versus what it’s like to be codependent. It’s easy to say that what we have is right and perfect and it’s a matter of the fact that our parents are awful (which is probably a factor- we get more dependent on each other when our parents come into the picture because both of us have awful parents and look to each other for refuge), but I’m also not very good at being a healthy person.
So what do you guys, as people with little stock in either one of us, think? Does this sound unhealthy or normal? How do we tell the difference, when neither of us really knows how to be normal in the first place?