I am in a relationship that makes me very happy. I wipe my boogers on the side of his bed while he scratches his armpits. We take showers and use body wash as shampoo. In the morning, I watch him neglect to brush his teeth and say nothing.
I hope, by now, that you are barfing. I kind of want to be just typing this. Because writing it down now, I’m disgusted. This isn’t how a relationship should be – -this isn’t how any life should be, really. We’re grimy. We’re gross. Looking now at the booger-caked sides of his bed sheet, and then down at the vaguely damp pile of laundry on the floor, I would even say we’re living in filth. But weirdly, it doesn’t bother me. Weirdly, I’m writing about it.
The thing is – and brace yourself – this “filth” that is our relationship is really important to me. It makes me disgustingly (fitting word choice, no?), unbearably happy. Not the being gross – that has no direct effect on my happiness level, except maybe that it’s kind of funny. What makes me this happy is that for all it’s griminess, our relationship is really really real. It’s so human, and so connected, that it just feels honest. There’s comfort between us, but that’s not what brings the grossness. More than that, there’s a sense of actually knowing each other – the real each other – and of being liked for that. The time I spend with him is time I spend with the true him, and the same for me. There’s nothing artificial, no walls, or nothing running on expectations – in fact, in a relationship that I laud for its grossness, I have no expectations. So we are raw and real and repulsive. He likes me, the real me, and I like the real him. And if this messy, undisguised truth must find itself in sweat and dirty hair and bare, stinky feet, so be it.
I’m not sure how we got like this, got so gross and close – It wasn’t on purpose, and it wasn’t premeditated. I suppose it arose from the messy past we built our relationship on – people hurt, people angry, people driven crazy, and we still kept reaching out for each other. Tentatively, then passionately. Despite the pain and filth of our beginnings, we kept coming back. So when we finally got where we are, got around to being honest with each other, there was no fake left. We were only me and him and what we had, what we wanted; who we were.
So we got gross and I starting leaving my dirty socks on his floor and he stopped shaving and I forgot about conditioner and we were our smelly, fleshy, human selves. No dates, no make up, no outings, and no flashy, filtered posts. In a way the images (all vaguely repulsive) that make up our relationship kind of physically represent it: uninhibited and kinda gross and entirely imperfect, like getting here, like our drool-y, matted heads in the morning. But in this imperfect filth, I’m finding perfection.
It’s not love (don’t be silly) but it’s nice. You would never think unwashed sheets and pulling on dirty socks in the morning is nice, I know. But this is happy, so I’m ok with it. I guess there’s a moral, and that’s that the best relationships you can have don’t look good, or smell right. Ours doesn’t – but that’s what makes it great.