Hello Lily!

A very quick post from me today as I'm sitting in my mother's house where I'm staying until next Wednesday (it's amazing how many levels of encryption, security and ensuring that you haven't left a trace of history on the computer that you can remember after so many years of not needing to!)

I'm really glad that I finally have the chance to talk about Lily because there was a real danger of this blog being more about me and Marlowe as we're the two that are going to be contributing most frequently. I wasn't quite sure how involved Lily wanted to be and thus haven't yet written a great deal about the other third of our relationship, but now.. Now I can go a little more into how Lily was an important part of my awakening.

I've said before that I'd never really considered Marlowe in that way before the conversation in the car and a large part of that was because of Lily. Lily is a truly amazing woman. She is strong, independent, scarily intelligent, strikingly beautiful and yet, in the right company she has a little streak of vulnerability that makes her absolutely endearing. (I can see her face as I'm writing this and although she won't openly approve of a critical mass of compliments, I plan to be very honest with this blog, so there!)

I'm incredibly fussy with women. I'm fussy with men because things have to feel right and there has to be something about them that puts me at ease, but with women, it's not so much the putting at ease that matters, it's the "something about them" and that's really hard for me to find in women and equally hard for me to describe. With any relationship there's a balance of dependence, co-dependence, individuality and your ability to be co-independent - a mix of vulnerability vs strength. I think I find that balance reasonably easy with men because there are enough public examples out there to look at and think "yeah, they've got that balance right" or "that doesn't seem right, (s)he isn't him/herself when they're together." I can compare my relationships to the public examples and think about whether I'm at the place that I want to be, whether I should be stronger or whether I should give the poor guy a break and let myself be a little more..obedient? not quite the word I'm looking for but that one appears to have escaped me.

I can't put my finger on why that's different for women. I think we're more sensual, more emotionally aware (yes, broad sweeping statements, I know) and that makes our relationships different, more emotionally intense with no real role models to help think about how things "should" be. Again, "should" isn't the right word but when thinking about such things, I like to have a broad set of examples and be able to go "somewhere between x and y is the right spot for us in this dynamic." So perhaps, getting that balance right is incredibly important but also more difficult for women. Perhaps it's only my experience that has shown this to be true but it has been an issue in the past.

With Lily, things are slightly different because we weren't looking at each other from the perspective of starting a relationship but that strength vs vulnerability balance is now so ingrained into my psychology that it's part of what makes a woman attractive to me. And that's one of Lily's great strengths. I noticed it when I first met her, before I knew that she was married to Marlowe or anything else about her and found her incredible.

At some point soon, I'll try and write about the balance of the relationship(s?) that we have as I think it'll be interesting to explore how I regard both Lily and Marlowe as equals but have completely different relations with them both as individuals. First, we'll have to continue with the story of how we got to this point though!