Last week I went to see Lady Antebellum with a girlfriend, for those of you who don’t know Lady A is a country band that sings about honey bees, sex, drinking and dancing and they are one of my absolute favourites. I ran into the ACC sporting my cowboy boots and a flannel shirt, which just goes to show that you can take the girl out of the small town but you can’t take the small town out of the girl. The day after the concert, still on a country high, I saw Boyfriend but he left my place around 7 so that I could watch the Leafs game, really.
On Monday I started to worry that maybe opposites don’t attract, maybe you couldn’t get past completely different tastes in everything. Maybe my obsessive love of country music and my tendency to scream epithets in the direction of any television playing a hockey game will one day be too much for my nerdy Boyfriend. But when I asked him if we were too different he laughed, guffawed even, and turned the question back on me asking me if it was an issue for ME. It’s not, not really, I like having someone to tell stories too and since we don’t always do the same thing I always have someone to regale with my stories of two stepping with strangers and that time I traded a bottle of beer for a tent at a festival.
Sometimes I hate that Boyfriend won’t come with me to a hockey game and I don’t understand why he doesn’t want to dance around to Eric Church while slamming pints at an outdoor festival, I really don’t. But at least our lives will never be boring, we’ll never grow tired of each other and we’ll always have a new story to tell.
I don’t know if the old adage about opposites attracting is true but I know that dating someone who is just like me would be infuriating, I’m loud and abrasive and sometimes wild and I don’t like to be told what to do; if I dated someone like me I’d probably hate them. Boyfriend is calmer than me; he brings me a strange sense of peace and calm that I don’t get from anyone else.
I dated the Country Boy, two of them in fact, and in the end they both made me miserable. There’s a big difference between the men we think we want and the men we actually need; Boyfriend has been what I need from day 1. Instead of just being the country girl like I was in the past I get to be the weird, country loving, Doctor Who obsessed, tech geek with a passion for all things hockey and a love of Irish whisky. I get to be all of me and if some of those things don’t line up with what Boyfriend likes to do it’s not the end of the world; I’ll just call him up and drunkenly sing country love songs to him when I get home.
