I met Dan in August 2014.
I was just about to start law school, and I had not done my due diligence on where I was going to live. But your girl is a spoiled princess who has a rich ecosystem of support even when she doesn’t even try.
My aunt had a friend who had a house in the DC Metropolitan area, and that friend was going to be in Korea with his wife and his younger son for his sabbatical that year. He said I could stay in the house while they were gone.
On the very first night, I locked myself out of the house.
Thankfully, I had my phone, which was at 4%. I rushed to get in touch with the owner of the house, and he said that his older son is in the area and can drive over to open the door for me.
That older son was Dan.
When he showed up, I was like, ew.
“Whatever my type is, he is not it.”
As a single virgin living in the city trying to be very ambitious with her future and pretending not to be horny and being completely clueless about her own sexuality, I was trying to play hard to get before anybody was even trying to “get” me.
After I thanked him, we parted ways, and I thought I was probably not gonna see him again.
The following week, I damaged their furniture.
It was a really expensive and valuable antique furniture that belonged to the matriarch of the house, who is now my mother-in-law.
I felt very uncomfortable upsetting the owners of the house that I was staying in. So I was like, “Why don’t I get on their good side by becoming friends with their older son?”
I called up Dan, and we hung out “as friends.” But it was so clear that he was nervous and was attracted to me. I was like, “Time to take advantage of this.”
I mean, I was fucking lonely. I knew nobody in the city. I already knew that I was going to hate my classmates. (If you are on a bell curve competing for the highest paying jobs, stressed out the ass, the capitalistic pigs in each of us will come out and fight. At least that was the assumption I felt comfortable with at the time.)
We hung out a few times, and at some point I asked him if he liked me. He said yes. And we talked through the whole night. And at some point I asked him if he wants to date me. He said yes.
I was quite the initiator.
I thought, “Well, I’ll just experiment here. I don’t find him physically attractive, but he seems like a decent dude. I will probably date for like 2-3 months and get the experience I need to date ~for real~.”
But within the first month, we moved in together. Shortly thereafter, he said he loved me. I bawled my eyes out because I knew how much he meant it, and I felt like I didn’t deserve it. I had gotten into the relationship for all the “wrong” reasons and treated him like an experiment. And yet, he saw past all that and simply loved the human being that I was, including all the fuckery.
I never felt so fully held by someone.
Fifteen months later, we were planning for our wedding. Two months later, we got married. Just before the spring break my 2L year. This month marks our 8th anniversary.
But here’s another wrinkle: I actually did not fall in love with him until after I got married.
Even though I felt so loved by Dan leading up to the marriage, I still did not know what it was like to love. I was so terrified of falling in love because I genuinely did not know what that looked like AND I was so fully subscribed to the belief that I needed to do love “right.”
It was only after we got married and watched Dan show up for me over and over and over again that I learned by watching. I was like ohhhhhh, so THAT is how you love. You simply extend yourself to the other out of delight.
It was easy to extend myself to Dan out of delight, too, because he gave, gave, gave effortlessly.
He was the embodiment of compassion. And when you’re around compassion enough, it’s easy to feed off it and be more of it.
I had always believed that I needed to love myself first before I sought for love elsewhere. Dan broke that paradigm into pieces and taught me that I am deserving of love without a single condition.
So that is how I found my very first love.
It happened without physical attraction.
And I always felt guilt and shame around this.
“If you are in love, aren’t you supposed to want to have sex with them 24-fucking-7??!”
Nope. It was just the wrong rule.
This is my position on shame: When you encounter shame, it always tells you about a rule that was never yours to begin with.
I thought that the rule I was supposed to adhere to was that I should be physically, emotionally, and intellectually attracted to my partner at all times if I am to proclaim that I am in love with him.
But then I realized that if I am always breaking that rule, that is not my fucking rule.
Here is what I discovered was my rule instead: I am in love when I decide that I am in love. Physical attraction, emotional attraction, and intellectual attraction can all happen separately, and sometimes concurrently. There is no experience that is “better” than the other. Each relationship fills me in ways no other relationship can.
Very importantly, I trust my decisions.
In my world, I am the monarch. Where have I betrayed my own sovereignty to submit to standards I have not consented to?
At several points in our relationship, even before we started talking about opening up our marriage, we had many conversations around our libido differential. There had been many times where he felt like he was not attractive because I was not physically attracted to him.
Only after we had decided to open up our marriage, we had serious conversations around our own relationship with our insecurities and stories that we brought into our relationship.
After extensive investigation and interrogation into the paradigms we realized we were no longer interested in, at some point Dan told me, “For the longest time, I made you responsible for my need to feel attractive. That is why I was upset with you for not wanting to have sex when I wanted to have sex. Needing that validation from you* was not how I wanted to love you. And the story I had in my mind was that in order for you to be attracted to me, you need to be physically attracted to me. But I can now see that you can still be attracted to me and be in love with me even without the physical attraction. I was able to believe you when you tell me you are attracted to me and love me. I see you. It took so much unwiring and rewiring to get here, and I am sorry that it took so long.”
(*I want to note here that we can want validation all we want. It just doesn’t have to come from a particular person. We can seek and welcome validation without requiring anybody to be different.)
And here we are, more in love than ever.
Wanting to spend more time and conversation with one another.
Because there is nothing that we feel ashamed of in our relationship. Nothing that we feel like we need to hide.
Because we do not make our insecurities anybody’s problem.
So when we feel so free to share transparently what’s going on in our worlds, we become even more curious about the other. We love knowing more about the other. We love being known by the other. We connect deeply.
We relate without expectations.
And, here’s the big bonus: Dan now has other partners who would find it baffling that I did not find him physically attractive and can fill the cups I was not able to fill.
And another big bonus is that we find ourselves being more willing to be a resource for the other. Meaning, we have more spontaneous and high quality sex because we honor each other’s no as much as we honor each other’s yes.
When I feel like I can say no at any time, I spend less time worrying about whether my answers are going to upset Dan. I have more time to witness the beautiful human that he is and connect with the emotional attraction (and increasingly, physical attraction) that allows for truer experiences of our sexual partnership.
To me, there is nothing more attractive than someone who is willing to witness and hold all of you, as you are. Even the differences. Especially the most uncomfortable ones.
If there were no right or wrong way to experience love and attraction, how do you experience it, and how would you like to experience it?
Let those juices flow. (Literally and figuratively.)
**
I got to experience the kind of love that I never thought was a possibility for me. Of course I wanted more. It felt like an injustice to have this kind of love with just one person.
That is why I resisted yet another rule that was not mine: once you’re married, you’re only supposed to love that one person for the rest of your life.
That makes absolutely zero, ZERO sense to me. If you are capable of growing the most magical and magnificent experience of love, why stop at one?
That is one big reason we decided to open up our marriage.
I advocate for loving however much we want, however way we want.
All while practicing the highest level of consent, including yours.
Did you fully, fully consent to the kind of love you are practicing now?
If you haven’t already heard, I am hosting a fireside on how to open up your marriage without losing everything on April 5 at noon ET.
I’ll share:
How to open up hearts to open up conversations about anything, including opening up your marriage
A loose framework that you can deconstruct and reconstruct for your own particular path of opening up your marriage
What relating actually looks like while going through the biggest changes in your marriage, including repairing from ruptures
The toughest kinds of dangerous relating to examine as we prepare for difficult conversations
Taking a closer look at the kinds of shame that arise in opening up your marriage and how to destroy the fuck out of those prowlers
If you have even one iota of curiosity around opening up your marriage, you are invited.
Register here: angela-han.com/open
This is so beautiful, Angela! Thanks for sharing. 💜 Maybe I should tell you about the time that I was married and opened up my marriage and how I had no idea what I was doing 😂
This is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. It interlocks so much with what I'm experiencing now. I'm having so many big issues in my marriage that I wish I could talk to you about because I know you'd understand me perfectly. Your story is so similar to mine but I haven't yet experienced the growth you have. Actually, I feel more like I'm in Dan's position than yours. Is there any way we can chat??