Nobody puts baillee in the corner

Who was your first crush?

My first crush was probably a toss up between Gomez from the Addams Family (as played by Raul Julia) or Meatloaf (yes, THAT Meatloaf. Was it the blouses or his stage presence that did it for me? The world may never know XD). OH and Kyle MacLachlan as Dale Cooper (what a fox!). My first proper in person crush was probably on a boy in 3rd grade who sat next to me in GT classes. He was a class clown trouble maker and had a pet rat (what a catch right?).

What are your views on Tinder and other dating apps?

I think dating apps are just another avenue for meeting people. We have so few after we graduate from school and move on to the next part of our life it’s good for people to have another way of meeting someone they can connect with. Granted, you have to really persevere through some less than stellar dates (so I’ve heard), but I’ve seen people connect through dating sites that wouldn’t have met otherwise and they seem happy. In short, I’m all for them.

What was the best date you ever had?

One of the best dates I’ve ever had is probably when my now fiance and I first started dating. It was probably during Christmas break our last year of high school; he and I would go on car rides together whenever he was in town from college (he’s 3 years and some change older; we met through swimming) and just talk. We took a day trip out to Stephenville to see a friend. I had been going through a lot with my eating disorder just prior to all this and had been ill, so it was nice to get away for awhile and just be. We just talked and sang the whole way there, and he didn’t expect anything of me. We were just two people enjoying being around one another. He made me feel like a person again. I wanted those moments to last forever, and when I got home it felt as though I was on a cloud. In those moments, we truly were infinite (shout out to Stephen Chbosky for putting to words such a peculiar phenomenon).

What was the worst date you ever had?

The guy invited me over to watch a movie, ended up trying to grope me with his feet and wanted to just open mouth slobbery make out. Ugh it was like kissing a bulldog. To add insult to injury, he then proceeded to body shame me after I tried to shrug off his advances. I shiver to think what possessed me to believe he was anything to fret over. I’m telling you girl, never again.

What goes through your head when you first realize you have feelings for someone?

For me it was kind of a slow process. Probably due in part to the fact that I wasn’t ready to be loved. I was still trying to recover from the worst of my eating disorder and had just had a really big falling out with a lot of people as well as getting out of a toxic “relationshit” (if you could even call it THAT much); I was at a really weird point in my life. Falling in love was basically the furthest thing from my mind at the time. Then George happened. We had been friends for a while, but didn’t really start talking until around this time. We started talking all the time, hanging out with each other every chance we got, and pretty soon I had no choice but to yield to the facts, try as I might to resist: I had feelings for him. I resisted at first because of the circumstances, then realized that the best course of action would be to just enjoy the moment and see where things went. It was in doing so that I was finally able to begin to love myself again and heal. When I realized I was in love with George, it was like everything had been building up to that moment. It very much was a revelation. Before George, I had never truly been in love. I had times where I thought I was in love, but looking back realized it was more that I was in love with the idea of them or stuck in the infatuation stage. What went through my head when I realized I could really be in actual love were things I had never even considered before. Before George, I thought I was never going to get married, didn’t even entertain the idea in fact; never entertained the idea of having even one child, just nothing of the sort. When I began to fall in love with George, I found myself daydreaming on these types of things. Thinking about a future with him in a way I had never considered with anyone else. Realizing I would be willing to change the course of my whole life as long as it meant we would be together.

What is the first trait that attracts you to someone:

How well we get along, how good of a person they are, and whether we can actually have a stimulating conversation. Of course there also has to be an element of physical attraction there as well, but I would say those are the big three.

How would you describe heart break?

Like slow motion dying. It is as though everything you know is a lie, and someone has hitched an anchor in your chest, and no matter how you try to swim away from it or ignore it it’s just there, weighing you down.

What is your break up routine?

It has been awhile, but just so much sad music. Morrissey and The Smiths, Tegan and Sara, Big Tree’s One Hundred and Four, the list goes on. I just turn into a big ol mope that doesn’t get out of bed, then I watch Pulp Fiction and begin the process of dusting myself off and moving on. This also includes a lot of “feeling myself” music, which incidentally means there’s gonna be a whole lot of Beyonce.

Have you ever been in love?

I am happy to say that I am currently still very much in love with my partner (and now fiance) of a bit over 6 years 🙂.

Do you think it’s possible to love two people at the same time?

Hm. This one is hard. I think at one time I believed this to be true, but you find that the love you may have for one person is not the love you may have for another (in a romantic sense). For instance, you may realize that the love you have for your current significant other is more true/real, while the love you may have for an old flame is more of the bittersweet/nostalgia kind of love that comes from romanticizing the past. Additionally, you find that the more you love someone, the more the unimportant types of love like that fall away and become just that: unimportant.

What does love mean to you?

Love can be many things. Romantic love, for me, is like air: it seems as simple as being, yet you would miss it were it suddenly not there. It’s as effortless as breathing, yet takes more work than anything you’ve ever done. It challenges you to grow as a person, yet loves even the darkest parts of you. Love to me is something that compliments rather than completes you, as one should firstly be complete on their own–how selfish it would be in fact to put that responsibility on another person! Love to me is being able to access depths of kindness and love I never even knew I possessed. Love is when I heard the sadness of loss in my partner’s voice, and it was in that exact moment that it were precisely as though the loss were my own. It’s doing something not because I want to, but because my first thought is how it would make my partner’s day that much better, that much easier. It’s being partners in the truest sense of the word. No matter the type, love to me is as close to true altruism as we may ever get. Love to me means “home.”

What advice do you have for someone who has never been in love?

Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid that you will never find love or that you are falling in love or anything of the sort for that matter. Find love in yourself. Fight for love and know that you will have to work like nothing else because it’s worth it. Don’t be afraid to realize that what you think is love is something else entirely; sometimes relationships don’t work out, and that’s OK too. Don’t be afraid to be pushy or straightforward. As George says he would still be working up the courage to move things forward if I hadn’t been the one to initiate and be open about my feelings for him. Know that no love will complete you, YOU will complete you, and don’t be afraid of that either; someone will come along that compliments you just right, and that will be far better a thing than someone fumbling begrudgingly to make you whole. Lastly, don’t be afraid to create love. Sometimes it can be a mixture of organic and made love–that is to say we can’t wait around all day waiting for our sun to shine–romantic as the notion may be–sometimes we need to go over ourselves and flip on the damn lights 😉