The things I'm truly afraid of

I'm sitting here with an engagement ring on my finger, 1 week shy of finally moving in with my recently-turned-fiancee, and having just read yet another in the endless list of surprisingly apt feminist thinkpieces littered across the internet (revealed only if one spends time in the right sort of spaces for them to enter your view). I'm having another glass of rose and maybe finally understanding why people drink alcohol so much. The defensive anxiety that tries to protect me from the idea that my thoughts might be bad is just... gone, and it's so nice to not have to deal with that for like, two hours.

The intent when I sat down was to do more work, but I think I only actually have like 4 good hours of work in me on any given day, and I can only stretch that if I know I need to (see: me before my transfer exam last year... and even then it was mostly just sitting in front of my computer). 

But what happens when we live together? What happens to my long, glorious stretches of time alone? Right now all our time together is these surreptitiously stolen weekends and long holidays, time when we can focus solely on being together and being a couple. Those are such deliciously happy moments. What happens when every moment is just... us being together? Neither of us has the time, and I don't have the energy, to be in that couple-focused space and to be living our own lives. What happens? I don't know.

I don't hear anything good, ever, of course. Everything you hear about living with men is bad. It kind of makes me wonder if I'm still a special kind of delusional for thinking that He Will Be Different. I know he's reading this too, maybe we will fight about it later, but then it's things like that that make me think maybe I'm right. Maybe knowing that posting this is a safe kind of transgression is a good sign. They say that that's a certain kind of safety in love, that you can get mad at the other person and know they still love you. It's not like this is the first he's hearing of this, either.

But suddenly it seems that a chapter of my life is closing, perhaps forever. Oh, sure, his hobby keeps him away on weekends and random chunks of time in the summer, keeps him hunched over a laptop poring over google earth and... sitting to count carabiners, I don't know. For all the bits and pieces of mountaineering I've absorbed over the past 5 years, I guess I still don't know that much about it. But those are weekends and random chunks of time. Every day I spend hours alone with my own thoughts, absorbed in work or play or whatever you classify mindless internet scrolling as. I spend it sipping wine and writing blog posts like this, or working on my novel that I really do want to publish, or finding more things to add to my to-do list. What happens when someone else needs my time more?

The article that triggered all this, if you were wondering, was about how there are so few great women creatives and geniuses because all those great men had women in the background taking care of all those stupid minor details of life. You think they were all washing dishes? No, they were making female servants and wives do that, they made their wives mind the children and make meals and tend to the house, busy work that leaves little time for an idle mind to create something. Not that I want to like, move into a shitty apartment and do nothing so I can write all day, but aside from the creativity aspect, there's the mental health one. I need time alone. That is not just me being dramatic. I don't want to meet who I am if I have to spend all my time with other people.