Steph Not Stephanie

I use a lot of words to describe myself: quirky, weird, occasionally funny, vertically challenged. One I haven’t used in a very long time: girlfriend. It sounds foreign to me, like something that applies to other people but not to me. I roll it around in my mouth, using different inflections and tones, trying to find that sweet spot that rings true. It’s a cute new pair of shoes I saw everyone else wearing and just had to have. They look fabulous, and go with almost everything – but the blisters are killing me and my old, reliable Docs are sitting in the corner, whispering conspiratorially about how comfortable they are and how much we’ve been through. Except they leak in the rain and if I don’t wear thick socks, they cut my heels. It’s a comfortable pain, the familiar kind, a kind I’m prepared for. These new shoes could hurt in all sorts of ways I haven’t even thought of yet.

My singledom has become such a part of who I am, one of the funny-because-it’s-true tragicomic things in my life (see also: my drinking, my cat lady status, being a disaster in the kitchen) that just is me. I’ve got this blog/persona/brand thing, and while everyone always asked hypothetically what would happen to the blog when if I found myself in a relationship, the trail of dating disasters ensured it was never an issue. I had a couple of near misses and ‘things’ that made blogging a bit difficult, but it’s been a long time since anything was worthy of a Facebook status change (Editor’s note: The one near miss that did result in a status change was not actually worthy, lesson learned).

My single status is so ingrained in my habits and in the way I talk that it’s harder to turn off than my sailor’s mouth. At Tinder Tales last week, with my beau in the audience, I was talking about how I drowned my brand new phone in wine the previous night, in my usual self-deprecating way. ‘This is why I’m … ‘ I trailed off, not knowing where to go with that sentence, with a beaming boyfriend in the audience. I just moved along to regaling them with vulgar, ridiculous messages from fuckboys and everyone had a jolly old time.

Not that I don’t think my life as a girlfriend will be any less ridiculous (on my end at least, not his). I managed to fall in the middle of the restaurant before the show (sober but in heels), I’ll always have my weird communication issues, and I’m still a drunken mess (Drunk Steph managed to overcome said issues and probably went all the way into over-communicative before getting locked out of the damn house on Sunday). Now I’m just one lucky guy’s drunken mess. You are welcome!