Ernie: Part 3

Towards the end of my first date with Ernie, I started trying to get him to kiss me. Only, like I said, I was actually shy with a guy for the first time in my life. He brought me to the Boston Commons and we sat on a bench across from a pond. I shimmied in close to him and he put his arm around me. It gave me a lot of butterflies. I waited for him to kiss me, but he didn’t.

My friends kept texting me while we were in the Commons, asking if I wanted to meet up with the group for dinner before we started the drive back. They wanted me to bring my new guy. I didn’t respond right away and Ethel ended up calling me, worried maybe something had happened. I walked away and took the call.

“I need some more time with this guy,” I told her. “I’ll meet up with you guys after you all eat.”

Ernie and I hung out for a few more hours. Then we met up with my friends. Ernie came with us to the train station where we needed to catch a train to bring us back to the parking garage where Chris had parked. Dave and his two friends I didn’t know had already left to go back to their car. It was Chris, Erica, Ethel, Ernie, and I in this train station.

“Okay,” I told my friends. “I’m gonna say goodbye to Ernie now.”

I stared at them pointedly.

Chris understood what I meant right away.

He walked a few paces away and tactfully pretended to be very interested in something on his phone. Erica and Ethel now.

I stared at them.

“Go ahead,” Erica said. “Say goodbye to him. We have a long drive back.”

I narrowed my eyes at them both, cleared my throat, and stepped in really close to Ernie.

Erica gave me a weird look, but Ethel went “Ohh, right! Sorry. We’ll be over here.”

Ethel took Erica’s arm and pulled her away.

Then I took Ernie’s hands and stepped in even closer to him. My eyes were exactly level with his. I decided I really liked that we were the exact same height. I’d never kissed somebody that wasn’t either shorter or taller. I’d never kissed somebody that was exactly the same height as me.

I blinked at him. I wiggled my eyebrows.

And then he kissed me. He had very soft lips and he was a VERY good kisser. Out of all the men I ever kissed, Ernie kissed me better than any of them. He moved his lips in exactly the right way. He put his hand behind my neck, pulling me in closer to him. It was the sort of kiss where your knees turn to mush and you have to hold onto the guy so you don’t get dizzy and fall.

Here is a bit that Ernie wanted to add to the post:

“I remember after I was walking back home, I felt very light, like I was walking on clouds. Then I called my friends and told them I met this lady and she was great. I figured people usually kiss at the end of the date and I should kiss you so it was a real date. You seemed like you wanted to be kissed. And then I went to do it and you leaned in. I was trying to do it in the park, but you weren’t looking at me.”

On the drive back, I told my friends, “I really haven’t been doing too much talking to other guys since I started talking to Ernie. But I’ve been doing a little. Not anymore though. I’m not logging back into Sweet on Geeks. This is the guy I want.”

And Ernie and I started our weird semi-long distance relationship of me going to Boston sometimes and him taking the bus to the next largest city to me and I’d go pick him up. My grandparents had never let a guy spend the night before, but they did with him, since he lived so far away. And my grandmother really liked him. She’d never liked a guy I dated before.

Ernie told me he was autistic the same day that I told him I’m crazy,

After a few weeks, I couldn’t keep it to myself anymore. I told him about my history of mental health problems. I told him about the psychotic break with Donnie Darko. I told him about my years spent on a revolving door in and out of mental hospitals.

When I was done telling him all of that, he said, “That’s okay. Everybody has problems.”

I said, “Problems like that? Those are red flags, guy. You should run.”

He shrugged and said, “You have mental health problems. I’m autistic. We both have problems.”

“Autistic? I have cousins who are autistic. They can’t talk or take care of themselves.”

He just looked at me and said, “I mean, I’m not that autistic.”

So he had Aspergers. He nodded a lot when he was nervous and he hated when plans changed. He had a very calm and steady energy. And he knew exactly how to manage me.

I’ve told him it’s pretty sad that he has to manage his wife like I’m a fucking toddler or something. And he always just says the same thing that he said all those years ago when we were dating. “Everybody has their problems.”

Ernie told me about how when he was a kid, teachers at his school would try to get him to play with the other kids. He told me that he was confused why he should want to play with other kids. He thought playing by himself was more fun.

He told me about how he had to learn how to have conversations.

“I used to tell people if I thought they were talking about something boring. I’d say ‘I don’t care about that.’ But then I figured out, sometimes you listen to people talk about stuff they like, not because you care about it too, but because you like them. You listen to people talk if you like them, because listening makes people happy. That’s stuff everybody else knows on their own; I had to learn it. Once I realized I was hurting people’s feelings, I got better at listening.”

Ernie knew a lot about politics. I didn’t know much, but I didn’t think I was as liberal as him. Ernie was very left-leaning. He identified as a socialist. I was skeptical of his views at first, but after being with him for a few months, I was a socialist too.

If you know me at all now, you might be wondering how I went from that to a Ben Shapiro stan. Well, I just got a little better at forming my own views and not soaking up the views of whatever the people I admire believe.

Also, my slow turn into conservativism began with the writing community. I struggled for a long time, looking at so much of the woke shit and feeling icky about it, feeling like supposed anti-racism was in far too much of an over-lapping Venn Diagram with actual white supremacy for me to believe it actually WAS the good and decent portion of the ideological spectrum. I mean, THAT much of a focus on race can’t be good. I felt that way for years and kept trying to talk myself out of my misgivings.

People tell me I’m brainwashed by Fox News and conservative media outlets.

I didn’t start watching those until after years of being very left-leaning and listening to increasing amounts of bullshit. What turned me against the left was the left.

But all of that hadn’t yet occurred in my character arc.

Back then, I posted on facebook about how evil and racist Republicans were. I posted that conservatives just weren’t good people and they were selfish, not interested in doing the right thing.

Ernie taught me a lot about politics, and he was so smart and knowledgable that I always thought whatever he believed must be right.

But our relationship took a bad turn about a year into us dating. It isn’t Ernie’s fault. It’s my fault.

In the next part of the story, I’m the antagonist again.

I don’t deserve and never have deserved Ernie.

My new goal in life is to become the sort of woman who deserves him. He’s never going to hold me accountable. He’s just too sweet and (for whatever reason) too smitten by me. So, I need to hold myself accountable.

That man really deserves some peace and quiet, and a way better partner than the one he currently has.