I love Ryan and I love living with Ryan. I always feel my most authentic self around him and there is nothing I love more than going for a run together, coming home to make dinner and spending our evening doing whatever we need to get done side by side on our ginormous couch (no, seriously- this couch is massive. 96 inches didn’t feel that big in a showroom but this thing is HUGE). Moving in together hasn’t really changed any of my habits; he loves Gossip Girl as much as my old roommates did due to his man crush on Chuck Bass’ hair, he laughs when I put on my iPod and bop my head when I am writing and we both fawn over our cat more than most people do their children.
But there are some things you just don’t do when someone else is home. .
Carrie Bradshaw so wisely called it your “Secret Single Behavior”, the things you do in the privacy of your own home that you would never do in front of your partner. Her “SSB” was stacking saltines with grape jelly and then eating them while standing up in her kitchen reading the latest issue of Vogue. I love watching my dvds of Sex and the City as much as the next girl who went to college right after the series ended and therefore, owned every single season so she could watch them hungover on Sundays with her roommates while eating tater tots and veggie buffalo chicken wings. I mean, for example.
But I never considered what my SSB was until tonight when Ryan was gone for the evening.
Immediately upon walking in my door, I was on SSB auto-pilot. A scene that has unfolded a million times before commenced once again.
I sat on our ginormous couch, a pile of previously unread fashion magazines on my left (how is Drew Barrymore STILL making covers, someone please tell me), huge fountain Diet Coke on the coffee table, Luna Bell on my right and my laptop on, well, on my lap. For the next 3 hours, I flipped through said fashion magazines, looked up things I liked on the internet, looked for dresses for a wedding I’m attending this weekend while watching every single episode of GLEE that I have recorded on the DVR. Fast forwarding to the songs I like, typically old school show tunes. Possibly Definitely singing along. Rewinding the ones I thought deserved another go. Singing louder. I took a break once for LB and I to go to the window to watch traffic together. While listening to French pop music on Pandora. And I may or may not have been pretending I knew French while attempt to hing (that’s hum and sing) songs I have never heard before in my life.
And I didn’t have to talk to anyone about anything.
Mind you, with Ryan here, I can do those things too. But I’m more focused on spending time with him, us both enjoying what’s on tv, making conversation. Tonight, I could be all about the show tunes, trendy dresses, celebrity gossip, and bbm’ing my BFF Holly when I needed her opinion on a few (or 11) dresses.
I’m happy to have Ry back home tomorrow but my evening of my SSB was enjoyable too.
Maybe if I set the closed captioning on the tv, Ryan can learn the words to GLEE and sing along too…