#I have a huge crush on Sheldon Cooper

[theromanticrationalist]

You mean Sheldon and Amy can KISS AT ANY TIME NOW. 😲😲😲🫨🫨🫨🤯🤯🤯

[andswarwrites]

Day 6

I'm going to tell a few personal stories this month, and this is the first of them: how S- and I became "S- and Stacey".  For context, tomorrow is our sixteen year anniversary.  S-'s parents are going to have a sleepover with N-. So S- and I will get to spend tomorrow and the day after together.  S- likes to get take out or take me to a restaurant, I like to just hang out with him, anywhere.  We've already given one another several gifts.  But we're like that all year long, we just step it up around this time.

I met S- twenty years ago, more or less.  I was a teenager and he was in his twenties.  To be exact he is eight years older than me.  My family was helping my sister move, and there was a lull before the work began, so I was outside talking to a friendly guy, when he looked up and said "Hey, S-!" and I turned to see this tall, dark-haired goofball sliding across a large patch of ice in the parking lot of my sister's building.  He had nice eyes, a big smile, and a baby face.  He introduced himself, and joined the conversation.

The whole time we were helping with the moving, S- hovered around me, and I felt at ease with him.  As a child, I'd always clicked with boys.  Not all boys, of course, but I also didn't click with all girls.  In my teens, though, I started to be self-conscious around "guys", and I was no longer natural with them, my behavior was forced and, in retrospect, just embarrassing.  That was never the case with S-.  He made me laugh, he was a good listener, he and I had a lot in common.

Despite the age difference, we had enough mutual friends that we would see each other when we would go see movies, and when we'd go to a coffee place after the movie, he and I would often end up sitting near each other.  That situation evolved into my parents trusting him to give me and my friends rides to parties.  Meanwhile, I was growing up, and one day I was no longer a cute little kid in S-'s eyes.  He noticed that I was pretty attractive.  I was completely oblivious to my feelings for him.

I'd had a pretty potent crush on someone else for a few years.  There's a quote from a movie I love, the remake of Sabrina (1995): "Illusions are dangerous people, they have no flaws."  I thought if I "loved" someone hard enough, they would eventually love me back.  Notice how I put "loved" in quotation marks, because there is such a big difference between infatuation and real, honest love.  The whole time I was chasing the illusion, real love was budding in me, but I was completely unaware of it.

Until.  Usually, when S- came to pick me up in his car, I would end up sitting in the passenger seat, next to him.  But when we also picked up one of his close friends, that friend called shot gun, and I was relegated to the back seat.  I was not happy about it, even though the back seat was perfectly comfortable.  I was like Sheldon Cooper being forced out of his "spot", and I realized that the reason it was my "spot", was because I wanted to sit next to S-.  I wanted to be able to look over and see his profile as he drove.

I'd always friend-zoned S-, possibly because he never hid his enthusiasm for my company.  When I appeared, he would make a beeline, with a huge grin on his face.  He still gravitates to me, even now.  And now, I finally appreciate this tendency of his.  Funnily enough, while I had a crush on another guy, S- had a crush on another girl.  So we each considered the other a good friend, even though we had such amazing chemistry.  And we got closer and closer as friends with each passing year.

I now had my own car, and a job at a little retail store, and I didn't bother to pack myself a lunch, because I thought skipping the midday meal would help me to lose weight.  I had a little Nokia flip phone and I had given my number to S-, and he called, and for some reason I confided that I had skipped lunch and I was hungry.  He was on his way home from work, and the place where I worked was on the way, so he stopped, got me some food, and brought it to me.  From that day on, he'd check in to make sure I was eating, and since I wasn't, he'd bring me food.  I got used to having him stop in every day to see me.

We were texting one another, seeing one another, I was falling for him hard.  But he wasn't asking me out.  And there's no other word for it, I had been rejected recently.  I didn't have the courage to ask him what his intentions were, even though they were pretty obvious.  So one night he texted me: "I just saw a shooting star!"; so I asked: "What did you wish for?"  He replied: "I'll tell you tomorrow."  I couldn't wait for tomorrow.  I was sure I knew what he was going to say.

When he joined me, just as my shift was almost over (by the way, I always worked alone in that little shop, and in the evenings we had the place to ourselves), there was a little bit of awkwardness.  He tried to get the words out, and he was just too shy.  Finally, he said: "Well if you'd wished on a star, what would you have wished for?"  Now, I'm a forthright person and I go after what I want, but my heart was still healing from that dumb crush.  Nevertheless, I just went for it, and said: "I'd wish I could go out with you."

"Really?" S- asked.  "Really," I replied, and thew my arms around his neck.  I closed the store, we went to a nearby coffee place, ordered two hot chocolates and sat talking.  And the rest, as they say, is history.  If I were to describe us in one word, I would use "inseparable."  Friends first.  Friends always.  We’ve had some pretty rough patches.  At times I worried we weren't going to make it through certain storms.  But with each upheaval, we've come to know one another better and better, we've seen how to support one another in more and more loving ways.  I'm confident that I have found my life's partner.  My one and only.