Love is Love.

Traveling with my friend

I have this friend who I am very close to. She has been in my life for about a dozen years. It is hard to put into words why this friendship works so well but it does. For privacy reasons, I will call her Mary. Mary came into my life at a time when I was going thru some changes.

I joined a gym back in 2010 was committed to making changes for the betterment to my health. I decided to hire a personal trainer to take me to the next level. She was assigned to me and she began training me with weights. This wasn’t exactly new to me but it had been many years since I had picked up a barbell.

At first, she was a bit intimidating. I had never known someone who was so into fitness and was not just talking the talk but walking the walk. She put me thru hell! She told me in the beginning that if I would just give her 6 months, I would fall in love with working out and that my flabby arms would firm up like hers. She lied…..Sort of….

Six months later I WAS in much better shape and had decided that I didn’t hate weight lifting. But the arms?? Still flapping in the wind!

Mary is a bit of an anomaly. She has a bit of an androgynous look, with striking features and a bod to kill for. She earned that bod. She is very dedicated to fitness. I have never had such a close friend like Mary. It took her months to admit to me that she lived an “alternative” lifestyle, as if she was hesitant to tell me that. She didn’t know me and perhaps wasn’t sure she could trust me with that information. Of course, I had already guessed that from her actions and appearance but I would never have asked.

Over time, we began to hang out and spend time together. I found her refreshing and figured out pretty quickly that I had a LOT to learn from her. There are too many things to list here but in a nutshell she taught me about love and acceptance. She opened my eyes about what love really looks like. I was so programmed as an early child to believe that there is only one way to love another person and that was one man and one woman. Any outside of that was just not right. I can thank my Catholic upbringing for that nugget….Did I mention she is twenty years younger than me? She calls me Miss Daisy when she picks me up to go out. Nice....

I soon began to know Mary’s partner Cathy (again, not her real name) and thru observation, I watched love grow between two women. They taught me to see love differently and that it is possible to fall in love with a person regardless of their gender. This “education” has changed my life and how I view companionship and true love.

When Mary and Cathy got married I was fortunate enough to be Mary’s Grooms woman. A title I took very seriously and honored greatly. Not only was I honored to be asked, but it was the most comfortable wedding I had ever attended! I wore a tuxedo and Chucks! Talk about comfortable. No spanks for this girl that day!

Mary and I have become travel buddies over the years. We travel together well and try to do it a couple of times per year. As I write this, she is sitting across the aisle from me on a Southwest flight back to Saint Louis. We just spent a long weekend sitting on the back of a boat, talking, puffing on a weed pen and eating WAY too much food to be comfortable. Mary is going through a really great spiritual transformation and I am so fortunate to have her take the time to share it with me. Mary and I no longer train together as we don’t live near each other but we still manage to catch up for lunch or dinner pretty regularly. Just when I think she is finished impressing me, she shuffles the cards and throws some spiritual eye opening shit my way….What a gift this woman is to me. The true beauty here is that we are comfortable enough with the friendship to be able say how much we value each other and when we don’t say it, we just know.

The moral of this story is that LOVE IS LOVE. I am so very glad to have been given the opportunity to learn and understand this concept from someone I admire so much. We have much work to do in this country to create an equal rights environment. As a heterosexual feminist, I will continue to stand up for my LGBQT community. They need out support now more than ever to break thru this homophobic right wing agenda that seems to be growing in our country.

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Stay weird!