Warning, this is basically a gush post!

Yesterday was my first anniversary with my boyfriend Scott, I had been in an 8 year relationship prior to being with him and it was toxic for a number of reasons. We never celebrated anniversaries. He never made me feel special. He never made me feel beautiful or loved or important or like he would even miss me if I was gone. I stayed because I didn’t know any better, and it was easier than leaving. We finally broke up February 2017, I spent most of the year focusing on myself and my relationship with my daughter, which had suffered some because of the relationship I had with my ex. I had no interest in dating, but 2 of my friends decided to make me a profile on POF and begged me to just get out and at least talk to new people. 2 days after Thanksgiving, I met Scott on POF. We met for a hiking date in the state reservation less than a week later, and have been inseparable since. About 3 weeks into hanging out with him, I knew he was special. I knew he was my person. I didn’t want to say it to him because I thought he would think I was crazy. Turns out he felt exactly the same way. We both just knew it. He moved in with us at the beginning of September 2018, and things have only gotten better.

Being with him this last year has been a dream come true. He doesn’t pick fights with me, he doesn’t argue, he never gets mad or calls me names or raises his voice. Even if he is upset with something that I’ve done or said, he holds me and reassures me that it’s OK, that we are OK, that he loves me and that we can handle anything together. We haven’t had any real issues, but anything that’s ever not been right we’ve been able to calmly talk it out and move on. I feel so loved and appreciated and supported every single day, it’s almost scary. He has been my rock, my safe place, my refuge in this chaotic world. He is supportive of my business, my dreams, everything that makes me who I am. My daughter loves him, my mother loves him, my whole family loves him. My daughters father and I have a great relationship, he is married with 2 kids. He and his wife have been unbelievably supportive of the relationship, and they love how comfortable our daughter is around him. Major change from the relationship I was in before. Scott and Eric (my daughters dad) have the same interest in music/TV, and are also closet video game nerds. So they get along very well every time we drive to pick my daughter up or Eric comes down to drop her off. It’s like a big happy family, which I know is not super common. Meri (my daughter’s stepmother) told me if he doesn’t put a ring on it then I’m going to have to do it, because there is no way I can let this guy go. People I’ve known for years have been telling me throughout the past year that they had almost forgotten what my smile looked like. They see that I’ve never been so content, so happy, so relaxed. I walk differently now, I hold my head up and take the world head on because now I feel like I can. I had a bunch of broken pieces, he picked them all up and glued them back into place for me. He really has restored my faith in love and I’ll never beable to tell him how much he truly means to me.

We have talked about wanting to be together forever, possibly have children of our own (we both have a child from a previous relationship). However, we don’t want to just get engaged for the sake of putting the title on it, we don’t want to do that until we feel like we are in a good place financially and living situation-wise to be able to start planning a wedding and a family almost immediately. Right now we are not in that place and we know that. He has retained little details about me, like the fact that I don’t like yellow gold. I prefer silver or white gold, honestly sterling silver jewelry is beautiful to me and obviously way less expensive. I also don’t like big clunky jewelry, I’m very simple and prefer small/delicate. Not a huge diamond fan, everyone has diamonds and I would prefer something different. Again, this was all brought up conversationally at some point over the year, there was never a formal conversation about a ring. Yesterday we were watching an episode of a show where a girl and her boyfriend were ring shopping, and I hated all of the rings she looked at. I must have been making a face because he said “Not your style?“ And I told him absolutely not, they just look so tacky to me. He shut the TV off and took my hands and told me that in his storage unit he has a couple of rings that belonged to to his Nana. She raised him for half of his childhood and was unbelievably special to him. He said he always wanted to love someone enough to give them one of those rings, but never found that person. He said “I’m definitely not trying to rush anything, but do you think you would like to take a look at those rings and tell me if there’s anything you like? Any of them can be resized, or if you don’t like any of the settings I can use any of the stones for something else that you do like”. I told him if he wanted me to look at them then I absolutely wanted to, so he’s getting them from his storage unit this week so we can look through them and see which ones are “me”. It was the sweetest thing, we are both very sentimental people so wearing one of his Nana’s rings would mean more to me than a several thousand dollar diamond that just looks like somebody else’s several thousand dollar diamond. I know a proposal is not imminent, because we are not quite at the point where we are ready for that yet. But I know it’s on his mind, and he wants to know what I like for when we are ready. I’m 33 years old, at this point I’m over the gushing, I’m over wanting Instagram likes for my ring or whatever it is people find important these days. I just want to live a quiet peaceful life with my soulmate, and I want to wear one of his Nana’s vintage rings that don’t look like anybody else’s. We wear matching silver bands on our right hands, the bands are inscribed with the coordinates of where we met for our hiking date, and to be honest instead of spending money on a wedding set I would be happy just switching these rings to our left hands and calling them our wedding bands. I honestly don’t care to spend ridiculous amounts of money on jewelry to symbolize how much we love each other. He gets that. He gets me. Him asking me to look at his Nana’s rings meant more to me than I can ever properly describe. He could take me ring shopping at any store and with any budget and I would not find anything that would make me as happy as one of these rings well. I haven’t even seen them yet and I already know that. It just made my heart feel warm and fuzzy to have him ask me to look at those rings

I just had to share this somewhere, I’m so full of love for him that it just spills out of me... and all over y’all 🤣