Yeah, let me warn you guys - I'm might be kind of unbearable for a while. I'm just really really in love, and I can't stop grinning, and sometimes it feels too good to be true and I feel like I'm just gonna float away I'm so deliriously delighted (when I say that, Ben will grab onto me and hold me tight and say, "take me with you!"), but you know, underneath all of the passion and giddiness, there's this deep, deep calm. A steadiness, a stability.

I've never experienced this before. Every other relationship I've ever had, I've chased after my boyfriend, never felt worthy, always waited for the bomb to drop, felt so anxious all the time. I had to talk to him every single day, had to be constantly reassured, never did feel reassured, and had to work so hard. Oh god, I think back to the Louse (and even Brian #2) - I started off with some bare scraps of the workings of a relationship, and then I struggled for years to make it work. I never appreciated how much effort it all was until now. There is such ease in being with Ben. I am continually relaxing and being more and more myself, no second guessing, no forcing.

And, oh, I have to tell you, what heaven it is to be with a man who doesn't view me as a consolation prize! (And how sad that I ever thought that was all I deserved.) I honestly never knew it could be like this. Every other man I was ever with knew I was fat - hello, you meet me, you know, it's not like I can hide it! - and they would know it getting involved with me, and always treated me (so very subtly) as if they were doing me a favor somehow by being with me. As if my body were somehow separate from the rest of me; as if they loved me but merely tolerated my body as if it were some burden, some affliction that was the price of caring for me.

And again, that's all I thought was possible, that's all I thought I could ever have. And then Ben comes along.

He treats me as if being with me, touching me, just looking at me, is a privilege, a delight, an honor. The subject of his first email to me read, "a guy with long arms likes a big girl to hold" and boy, did he mean that. He wraps his arms around me and pulls me so tight, it's as if he can't possibly hold me close enough. He wants to feel me, to touch me, all of me. I have never felt so desirable in all my life. On New Year's Eve he took me to dinner and then brought me home and drank champagne off of my nude body and told me, "you are the sexiest woman on earth" and I never for a moment doubted him.

You realize, of course, that it isn't all sex (and even the sex isn't all sex; it is the connection, the closeness) - I am so blissful just to be with him, it doesn't matter what we do. Last night we ran errands (he bought gloves and I bought a new watch battery) and then came home and made dinner (he made salmon; I made asparagus and winter squash - yum!) and then we stayed up all night talking about cribbage and trigonometry and mnemonic devices (we both remember the abbreviation for gold on the periodic table from an episode of The Facts of Life; we are unabashedly geeky, especially in bed) and the point is, it doesn't matter what we do together.

And have I mentioned that my whole family thinks he's great?

(And whoa. I wasn't being figurative when I said we stayed up all night. I didn't sleep at all (Ben fell asleep around 5:30). I'm just now starting to feel it.)

Boy, you guys are gonna get sick of me awfully soon if I keep up my dreamy sighs and swooning, but you know - I deserve this.