2 boyfriends

I’ve had two boyfriends in the last five years.

I don’t say that with pride or with sadness. I say it the way you’d say any fact about yourself that you’ve stopped trying to explain to people who are going to interpret it however they want anyway.

It takes me a long time to say yes.

Not because I’m evaluating someone against a checklist. Not because I need perfection, certainty, or some guarantee that it will work forever. I know even the most doting “I’ll love you forever” is just a statement. But because the word yes does something to me that I can’t easily undo. Once I let someone in, they get filed into a part of me that doesn’t have a delete function. They become someone I think about when I hear a certain song. Someone whose favorite foods I’ll remember years after I have no reason to. Someone whose birthday I’ll always know, even when I stop saying it out loud.

I’m slow to enter because I’m slower to leave.

And I don’t mean leave physically. I mean the other kind. The kind where you stop carrying someone in your chest. The kind where their name becomes just a name again and not a small earthquake. That takes me longer than I’d like to admit. Longer than it probably should. Longer than the relationship itself sometimes, which is its own kind of embarrassing, to still be holding something that the other person set down months ago.

So I’ve learned to be careful at the door. Not because I’m afraid of love but because I know what love costs me when it ends. And it’s not a cost I can calculate in advance or protect against with logic. It’s just the way I’m built. Things go in, and they stay.

Two boyfriends in five years means two people I let in all the way. Two people who got the unedited version. Two people I still carry in some quiet way, even though carrying them no longer serves any practical purpose.

It also means every time I consider saying yes to someone new, I’m weighing something most people don’t see. Not whether they’re good enough. Whether I’m ready to hold another person in the part of me that doesn’t let go. Whether I have the room. Whether my hands are finally free enough to carry something new without dropping it.

I take my time not because I think I’m above anyone. I take my time because I know myself. I know that when I love someone, it will be with a quiet permanence that outlasts the relationship by years. And I’d rather wait longer at the door than spend another year learning how to set someone down.