#sorry it took me so long to write this probably no one gaf anymore

[dykephan]

my thoughts re: how did dan and phil kiss in october and still not start dating until december? from @omatone-dnp's post here :)

i'm sorry in advance for how much forbidden material i'm bringing up here, i feel bad about it which is why i'm putting it under the cut so i can delete this if i want to

so obviously we know they talked online & on skype for months before they decided to meet up in person, and they were heavyyy on the flirting. but we also know that these online spaces were the only places dan and phil were able to be 100% openly queer, so it's natural that they both put on a persona to some extent. this was the time for them to explore who they were & who they wanted to be. dan says he assumed phil would be this super confident smooth guy but then he was awkward and dorky irl, and it was kind of the reverse for phil about dan.

phil might have felt a lot of pressure to be a good example considering he was older, he was someone dan liked on youtube, and phil was one of, if not the first, gay man dan had met. but phil didn't have much romantic experience (...his heart had never done the flippy over thing..............) so i can imagine he felt even more scared of screwing things up. we know he was super nervous the day they met and that he didn't make the first move. i think he wanted to leave that to dan because 1. he didn't know if dan actually liked him or if he was just confused, and 2. he wanted to go at dan's pace for the reasons i mentioned above. we also know that phil had a hard time verbalizing his emotions / understanding them, so he might have wanted to go slower on the romance front too, so he could have time to process everything. he talked quite a bit about how he didn't know where he wanted to go in his life, feeling lost without being in school anymore, and that his family was pressuring him to sort his life out. that's a lot to deal with all at once and adding a serious relationship on top of that can be hard.

for dan, i think the early days were more about finding inner confidence in himself than they were about purposely forming a long term relationship. phil is the one who encouraged dan to make youtube videos, which he'd dreamed about but never thought he would be good enough. phil made him feel safer than he'd felt since he was a tiny child. he introduced him to other queer people and then to his family, who welcomed dan with love (though we don't know how much they actually knew at the time). it was more than just romantic!! it was something dan really needed! :(

at this time, both of them were constantly talking about how they're trying to figure out what to do with their lives, with dan being in his gap year and phil being fresh out of college. it was a transitional period for both of them in very different ways. they weren't even sure if they were going to meet irl, they kept going back and forth about the train tickets for a few months before dan finally bought one. i think as soon as he bought it, he decided he was going to shoot his shot and worry about everything else later.

also, dan was in a relationship with his girlfriend for 3 years, and while we don't know when or how they broke up, he has some tweets indicating that they were still together in 2009 when he began talking to phil online, or at least that dan was still conflicted about the breakup. let me clarify that i'm not saying dan cheated, none of us have any idea what happened and it seems more like their relationship came to a natural conclusion when she moved away for uni, along with all of dan's irl friends which he talked about frequently. i'm more so bringing this up because it marks a shift in how dan talked about love and relationships.

for example, all of these tweets happened in october 2009, right before he met up with phil:

but fast forward to THAT week in december and dan has a completely different perspective on love:

this is the main reason why december makes so much more sense to me as their anniversary. october was about taking a leap of faith even though both of them were afraid of getting it wrong. november was about testing the waters and figuring out how they could logistically make things work, while they were building their bond. december was about finally letting go of all those fears in the pursuit of a happier future for both of them ;-;