Sunday Sundries: The Cuddles' Extended Meet Cute
And by "Extended" I mean years
Welcome to Sunday Sundries! The surprise grab bag of whatever I feel like writing (I also take requests). Today I'm going to tell you how Cuddles and I got be Cuddles and I!
It was 2008. I was in my mid-twenties, and thought I was a gender non-conforming cis lesbian.
I decided that I wanted to study, and applied to some Universities for a 4 year programme (BAs in the UK are three) which included a Foundation Year where mature students, foreign students, and 18yr olds who didn't get quite the required grades took classes in their subjects, but also took one module on academic writing, and another on academic presentations.
So for me, 2009/2010 was that. History & Philosophy, in an entirely new place, and getting around mostly on crutches because of smashing my knee up in 2008 (was on those til they removed the metalwork in my last year).
So it was Cuddles’ first year, and my second. Second semester. First small group session in a Philosophy module (she was taking Philosophy & English Lit), we did the usual icebreaker thing (which I hate, btw, and have to have pre-prepared answers for or freeze…which is the opposite of what an icebreaker is for. Heheh).
She said, proudly, that she'd joined the creative writing club. Something worth being proud of, to be sure, but I already had my answer, and she's sat right next to me, and it's too late to find a new answer now so I have to do it…
“I'm a published author.”
Her face does a half expression of “Aw, that just stomped all over mine” and a half expression of “THAT IS SO COOL MUST KNOW MORE!”
And so began a cool friendship.
But reader, this is where it gets fun. Because I'm demisexual. I don't get attracted to anyone until I've gotten to know them. And by that point, we're already friends and I don't wanna risk anything because they're not indicating not-straightness and even if they did like girls they wouldn't be into me anyway. Whereas I have a friendship with someone who I think well enough of to be attracted to, so, I wanna keep that.
So with all that settled, I set her up with a male friend of mine, with whom I’d gotten very close since we'd met the previous year.
I joined a group with Cuddles and friend to play some TTRPG, Cuddles as the GM playing a combo new World of Darkness game. I came in as a vampire, and by session 2 I had been given an extra passive skill: accidental seduction. Because my vampire charmed the pants off of everyone she met (and in the case of one if the rulers, that was literal).
But there was a Halloween special non-canon oneshot where Cuddles combined our world with that of The Night Circus (great book, you should check it out if you don't know it). And as a very emotional and dramatic scene played out between my vampire and Cuddles The GM as my lover, I realised that I was gonna need some space because that activated all the feels. So I quietly stopped going and made excuses.
Cuddles and friend dated for a couple of years, but it wasn't really romantic in nature. As she's said to me - he was nice and good looking and all the things that she was supposed to be interested in, she just didn't feel the feels.
More aware now that she's ace, that makes sense, but at the time it was a source of frustration.
Anyway, they broke up, and I was still friends with both and they stayed friends too, so we still played video and TTRPG games together with the group.
Meanwhile! I had come out as trans and non-binary, and (again, as I know now) Cuddles had the strangest thing happen.
For the first time ever, she had a crush on someone. Me. And she had absolutely no idea what to do about it!
It was a few months into my T hormones that things happened. I don't remember where this started, but I confessed (via messaging, cos we didn't live near each other) that I'd had feels and that was why I'd stopped going to the games.
And her response to my “I knew you'd never be interested” spiel?
“Well you never asked.”
So there I am. Mind blown. Cue a couple of weeks of: Does that mean I should ask now? Or was it just a throwaway comment? She probably didn’t mean that I should ask, that would be silly. 99.9% of people’s attraction radar doesn’t even register me as a blip for fuck’s sake, I’m just going to embarrass myself and I am VERY sensitive to rejection.
But…
Oh, but what if…
On the other side of things, Cuddles spent this time wracked with “Oh god did I just mess everything up? I’ve never done this before and I have no idea how to handle any of these feels!”
Eventually, on Jan 2nd 2016, 5-ish years after we first met, I wrote a long message, asking her out, desperately couching it in “You probably don’t want to and that’s OK, we can forget this and keep just being friends because I really value that, but if you’d like to…”
And. She said yes, she’d really like to.
There’s more story about how our first date got cancelled because of her egg donor but that’s a WHOLE can of worms (and a dead cat in a box) which I’m not getting into today. But basically, from that day onwards, we were a thing.
We got engaged, moved in together, and somewhere along the way the various nicknames we have for each other started to include variations on “Cuddles”, and that one kinda stuck as the main name both between ourselves and to other people.
One friend—the same one that Cuddles had dated before, in fact—calls us the Interchangeable Cuddles. And, remaining one of the closest friends to us both, was also in the wedding party.
So there it is! The extended, multi-year, meet cute. I mean OK, it’s not quite a cheesy romantic movie, but it’s worked pretty well for the last 7 years.
If I’d asked her out all those years ago, I don’t know how that would have gone. I think I, at least, needed that time, to find my trans self, and begin down that path, before I was properly able to journey with someone else.
I‘m grateful daily that we found the right time for us. I had accepted the idea that I’d never find anyone, but here I am, next to my Cuddles, who has broken down all of those barriers just by being herself.
Some days we hold each other up. Some days I hold her up. Some days she holds me up. I don’t believe I can ever offer her equal to what she gives to me, but I do my best, and I have to believe her when she tells me it is enough.