54m here for reference.

Best long term romantic relationship: We will be celebrating 20 years married this year. Two kids and we’re well on our way to spending our dotage together.

Best Friend: We’ve been friends for 5 years. Have literally played hundreds of hours of D&D and other role playing games, along with a group of fellow fathers and mothers that all like family. We got to play D&D in Lake Geneva, WI at the very birthplace of Game Cons this past year. That was pretty great.

Familial (specifically, blood relations): Terrible. My parents are dead and I would be estranged from them now if they were still alive. Estranged from both my older brothers. I have no plans to reconcile with them. They made their choices and it did not involve their younger brother. I have a FB connection to ONE of my many many first cousins.

Top-3 easily all dogs.

Then the rest is a few horses, a few birds and maybe one person.

I wouldn’t presume my relationship with cats.

Coworker I met when I started at my current job a year and a half ago. She’s the only person who makes me feel unconditionally loved, safe, and more confident in being myself than anyone else. She’s pushed me to be more engaged in the friendships I care about, which is hard because introvert. She has an awesome personality and has introduced me to a group of other squiggly (LGBTQ+) people who are super supportive.

Love at first sight 😊

My best relationship was with my birth maternal grandfather. He was like my equivalent to an Uncle Iroh; cool, accomplished, wise, patient, and caring. If there was anything that would improve any negative day I was experiencing, it could be found from him. I don’t remember a single negative experience from him.

He had one of those rare unisex names, and I always used to feel awkward that my adoptive mother (who was also his adoptive sister via their own mother my “birth” maternal great grandmother, err, his adoptive mother and my adoptive mother’s birth mother, not sure how to label that) took advantage of that and named me after him in the renaming process despite being his granddaughter, but after a childhood spent with him, not a single part of me questions that choice. I currently reside in his old home, where occasionally I make him breakfast forgetting he is gone and proceed to have a literal toast to him and eat it in his name upon correcting myself. That’s how much of an impact he had.

My adoptive mother, second-oldest birth sibling, BF, and two friends I made who were the children of family friends of my mother also serve as honorable mentions.

Personally I gave up on connecting with people.

My brother but to be fair he is someone everyone loves. Hes like the favorite family member of my wifes even including hers.

I left home at 18 for a job and it was like I ceased to exist to anyone that I’d loved before then. My old friends and my family completely seemed to forget about me.

So ten years on, I finally have had enough of this loneliness and boredom, so I searched through a reddit LFG for DnD5e online through Roll20 since I’d played it for a little while with coworkers and understood it well enough. Joined a group with a rigorous entry questionnaire and met a bunch of others that have been through thick and thin together now.

But in that group, one of the people was somewhat outward with their own troubled past that matched mine in a lot of ways. From there we got talking, and we started to become friends. And through a few games and a now a handful of years, they are one of the - if not the - most important people in my life.

They help validate my struggles and offer solutions when I want them, and they come to me when they need the same. I moved across the country to be closer to them and a few others from the DnD group and it’s just really been life changing for me in no small words. I started therapy, I stopped being suicidal, I’ve grown so so much, and I’ve learned depths of love that I’ve never encountered before. I do have a crush on my friend and they know, but we’re entirely platonic and as close as we can be (I think I’m just Demi sexual?? I just fall in love with people close to me even if it’s not romantic).

From how they describe their end, they’ve experienced a lot of the same things and a lot of the same personal growth. Neither of us would be who we are today without one another.

I have a really cute cat that actually shows affection and meows really cute

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