01304: Love Is Never Easy - But It Is Always Worth It

When Tobie and I first tell them about our unique relationship with Prince, we tend to get a regular mix of expected reactions. There's of course the initial disbelief. There's the inability to understand things right away. There are those who can only see this working on a purely physical / sexual level. And of course there are the most positive reactions of support, wonder and basically just cheering us on for taking this path. Love takes us to interesting new locations and makes us go through scary new adventures. But all the difficulty makes the journey more than worth it.

It's not always a bed of roses, of course. As amazing and wonderful as our relationship is now, at the same time we have our fair share of hiccups and diversions. But to quote the character Darwi Odrade from Chapterhouse: Dune - "Real boats rock." Show me a relationship that goes absolutely perfect and I'll show you how things are actually very shallow and most issues remain festering beneath the surface. It's the challenges in life that help us to grow stronger as we face problems and doubts together. No human being was ever created perfect after all. We all work together to become stronger and get through life. While we all need to be strong as individuals, we do exponentially better with the love and support of others.

And when you live a life as publicly that we do given the photos we share, the blog posts we write and just who we are at places like O Bar, there's that sense of being watched and evaluate by everyone around us. And that's just how people are - we watch everyone else and we speculate as to what happens "behind the scenes" And for a relationship as unique as what the three of us share, it's inevitable that people will focus more attention our way.

But as a former boss of mine once taught me, you need to focus on whose thoughts and feelings you really need to be concerned about. You can't trouble yourself with how every single person out there will think of you - the public world beyond is out of our control. Even the biggest of celebrities are unable to please every single person out there. So instead we focus on those closest to us - our family and true friends. And in terms of relationships, ultimately we're only accountable to one another. Those are the opinions that matter more than all others.

It's crazy to think that we're only just approaching our first month together and yet it feels like we've already experienced years' worth of memories. And that includes both the ups and downs as the three of us come to terms with the reality of what all this is and how we feel about one another. It's definitely scary, uncharted territory at times. But like I keep saying in these blog posts, our hearts act as our compasses and lead us safely home to where we belong.

But together, the three of us are so much stronger than even just the sum of our strengths as individuals. And that's important since we're not perfect, like I said before. We all make mistakes. We all have our bad days. We all have those moments when we feel insecure, inadequate and lost. But it is through the love of those closest to us that we find our way, find new strength and come back into the light.

Our hearts, at least with respect to our emotions, are incapable of lying. Everything we feel is an honest statement from within and one that we can only try to process intellectually and hope to understand in time. Sometimes the feelings do have a logical basis. Sometimes they're just paranoid fears that come with thinking too much. And man, that's one weird thing that the three of us have in common - we all have that risk of over thinking things and always expecting the worst.

I guess that comes with the hardships each of us have experienced. We all learned to be strong on our own. We've all experienced a lot of hurt and disappointment. We all have our walls and our internal defenses we keep in order to avoid the risk of pain in the future. It's only human to do what we can to keep ourselves safe from hurt and harm given the wisdom of experience.

But there are also those cases when we need to take new risks and allow ourselves to open up to others once again. Even the strongest of relationships start out shaky and uncertain as each party needs to expose themselves and open themselves up to the risk of pain and loss. But when we know in our heart of hearts that our love is true, then we know that all sacrifice is more than worth the risk - worth any risk.

I love you Tobie and Prince. And everyday is a new opportunity to prove just how much I love you and to renew my promise to love and take care of you each and every single day.