encouragement to gush about my wife?? DON’T MIND IF I DO
the original post where i talked about it the most is here but reblogging it puts the whole thing under a cut and this is my personal blog so no more courtesy cuts for irl stuff, especially not for this specific irl stuff. aw yeah babeyyy we’re rewriting this thing from scratch for EXTRA GUSHING! you even get proper capitalization, a thing i usually don’t have the energy to do, that is how important it is.
So Azaya and I met on GoS in 2008. And by “met” I mean we made googly eyes at each other from across the forum for months, both desperately looking for any excuse to interact despite convincing ourselves that the other was just Too Cool for us and wouldn’t want to be friends. For context, I would strategically salt her content through my picture posts in the hopes that she would notice and comment, and she signed up to assist with a steampunk content curation list that I had also signed up for, despite not actually using any steampunk content in her game.
We did eventually manage to nut up and talk to each other, and our official meetcute was that I sent her a message on AIM back when my username was "Alert Interpol” in reference to the band Interpol (I had bad taste), but because she was actively torrenting an album at the time, she very briefly thought I was the fucking international police. (But the cops don’t usually start messages with ‘omg hi i love your sims content’ so we cleared it up fairly quickly.)
We hit it off super fast. Like, frequently-stay-up-all-night-talking-even-though-she-had-work-at-six-in-the-morning fast. We both tend toward having a very small group of close friends but it usually takes years for either of us to reach that point, but it was maybe eight months before we were calling each other a best friend.
The jump from ‘a’ best friend to ‘the’ best friend happened when we started writing together. I had been in an RPG that dissolved and was missing collaborative writing. Azaya hadn’t been in any RPGs but used to write with a friend when she was younger, so we decided to give it a try together. As writers, we worked really well together. We started out writing some very casual, silly stuff, but ultimately stumbled into a story about parasitic space gods and the looming apocalypse in which an obligate cannibal demon and her human witch girlfriend try to save the world without getting ritually sacrificed. We wrote several different iterations on the main story and a bunch of branching AUs that amounted to literally hundreds of thousands of words.
Regardless of the changing set dressing, the core of our writing was the two main characters, and their relationship. No matter the setting, the two of them always fell in love and, as a result, we spent a lot of time talking about how the two of them specifically were in love as it changed over the course of our writing, but also just love in general. We were both in abusive relationships at the time, and we’d each convinced ourselves that it didn’t get any better than that and we deserved the treatment that we were getting. We could each see what was happening to the other and were fucking livid about it, but we couldn’t internalize it for ourselves. Like, I could very clearly see that her boyfriend was dog shit and she deserved so much better, but I would still make excuses for why what was happening to me was acceptable and deserved. And it was the same for her. But because we talked to each other so much about these characters of ours being in love, and what we thought love should look like, we always had this kind of inadvertent framework for what it was that we truly wanted hanging out in the back of our minds. And eventually it clicked for the both of us that like, yeah I fucking do deserve a soulmate, and this douchebag I’m wasting my time on certainly isn’t it.
Even after that, it was several months of making awkward eyes at each other (again). Like, we had both put the pieces together about who it was we wanted, but we were both shit terrified of making things irrevocably weird by being like ‘oh by the way I’m in love with you and I think I have been from literally the moment we met but I didn’t realize it until a few months ago haha isn’t that funny unless you think that’s weird in which case forget I said anything’. We got our shit together eventually and confessed our extremely mutual love, and knew pretty immediately this was headed marriage-ward. We didn’t really need to date when we had already spent so many countless hours talking about who and what we wanted. We wanted to be in love with our best friend, we wanted to get married, we wanted that ‘til death shit. It was only a few months before we got engaged and I think a year and a half in total before we got married. Equal marriage hadn’t passed the supreme court yet, but when the state right next to mine passed it, we hauled ass to the courthouse.
We got a lot of push-back from family, some of it valid (‘this seems kind of fast, y’all sure about this?’), and some of it extremely invalid (‘I think you’re going to want to be with a man ultimately so why don’t the two of you just date so it’ll be easier to break things off when that happens!’). We needed external support, and we wanted to be able to build a strong foundation, so we went to couple’s counseling right away, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Azaya and I had pretty unique circumstances in a lot of ways, so the few times people have asked us for relationship advice, it’s hard to give any sort of universal ‘do this, not that’, but I really do earnestly believe every couple should go to counseling at some point. I can’t say how valuable it is to have someone objective to give you constructive feedback and help to guide you in figuring out the best ways to communicate with each other. Having someone in our corner like that is how we were able to hit the ground running.
This October it’ll have been ten years of this ‘til death shit and I am so fucking pumped for all the years to come. I just love her so, so much. So much more, every single day. She’s everything I wanted and more. I literally cannot imagine life without her, nor do I want to. There’s going to come a day when we’ve been married longer than we haven’t, when I’ve spent the majority of my life on earth with her, and I cannot fucking wait.
TL;DR: Thanks for the soulmate, The Sims 2. 10/10 would marry her again.
