Life update: I’m excited. I’m exhausted. I’m a bit confused and I’m living out of a bag. Sufficed to say, I’m at the start of a relationship with Whiskey J. Everything is going really well for the most part. I did have a bit of a freak-out which I’ll get to later…

It’s pretty incredible how a rush of new feelings combined with the attempt to manage what you need to live in two different locations can throw even the savviest of women off-center. Currently, my car is a mobile closet – still carrying me to work and home – but it has taken on a new role of housing multiple shoe options, workout gear, sundresses, bathing suits (it’s summer, people) strapless bras and necessary accessories. Somehow I’m pulling off not looking I’m as thrown together as I actually am.

This transient lifestyle is a good problem to have because it means that I, Lady Prosecco, have found a man who is put together, sexy and interesting enough to motivate me to pack a bag in the first place. I won’t gush – but I will say he came out of no where. He is very different than the men I’ve dated before and he seems to take this whole dating thing seriously. He plans dates, he gets excited to see me and is doing the little stuff we women look for that seems to make all the difference.

However like most men (and me) he’s not the best when it comes to sharing his feelings. We are spending a lot of time together. He has been married before, so making room in his life for me wasn’t as much of a lifestyle change for him as it was a returned comfort, I think. But for someone who has never been welcomed into a man’s life so seamlessly, it was hard not to read into that level of nearly instant comfort. Hence, the freak-out.

I will give myself the defense that said freak-out happened six weeks into spending more than four nights a week together, on average. We had broached the ‘where this is going,’ topic by deciding it was too early to talk about it, coming to the groundbreaking observation that ‘this is fun’ and that was good enough for now.  We also agreed to dodge the ‘exclusivity,’ ‘timeline,’ or any other scary questions I personally try to avoid discussing until the last possible moment. Yet, here I was laying alone in his king size bed, wondering if I was going to cry.

To complicate things, nothing happened to prompt such a response. It was a Monday morning. He woke up early, kissed me goodbye and went to work. We knew where I’d hide his key card. I knew where the gym was and that there were eggs in the fridge if I got peckish. It was that damn comfort again. The same thing that pulled me in and made me feel safe in this thing was also making me feel like this bed was actually a bus bound for crazy town, and I had a ticket to ride.

Was I the only person feeling feelings here? What’s wrong with being trusted to get ready and lock up? Why was I feeling anything right now? He had to go to work – it’s not like he abandoned me. But I missed him. That’s what it boiled down to. Once I figured that out I decided not to cry, rather to steel myself. I had no idea where he stood, and that’s how vulnerable catapulted to unstable in a flash.

This realization was followed by my withdrawing a bit and trying to tell him what happened to be fair. He then read into my reaction as an underlying desire to stay out of a relationship and then affirmed that assumption by telling me what he thought I wanted to hear, that we should see each other less and cancel an upcoming trip.  It was not a great couple of days. But we figured it out – and now things are better.

We’re not exclusive. We’re not on a timeline. But we both have the feelings. And my middle school-aged emotional self is happy with that level of validation.

I’ll keep you updated. Hopefully, my next post will be a little more newsworthy.