What are your three non-negotiables (in a relationship)?

[clay]

Great list, Anya! I concur on all your points!!

Originally Posted by *Anya*

I am on a roll tonight and did not follow the rules for the thread. Bear with me, please.

Love me, love me dearly, with all of your heart and soul: for better or worse.

If, by some (very) strange reason, there are some slightly harder to love "things"; communicate them to and with me, openly, honestly and with kindness. I promise I will do my best to hear you.

Honesty always as a tool of self-sustaining love. It is never to be used as a bludgeon of deliberate harm or pain.

Commitment to the long-haul. The forever love. I seem to develop that kind of love fairly easily once I stop being afraid but I then chose to bestow it on those that are not exactly interested in same.

Don't be easily angered. I do also have a propensity for easily angered people. When I was young, I always fell in love with bad boys. Then when I fell for girls; the bad girls. The ones with anger close to the surface of their skin and that one wrong word could make them blow. I spent lots of time walking on egg shells to keep it contained but I always made a wrong move and thar she would blow...

Believe that sex is not only to show love and caring but that it is fun and playful. Please love oral sex; both giving and receiving or know I am not the one for you. I was happily in a relationship for the first 10 years with my long-term stone butch but then she wanted a reciprocal sexual relationship and I fell in love with the giving of oral sex, during our last 9 years together. It is hard to put that genie back in the bottle once it is out and I am too old now to want to. It gives me joy.

Really honor the words "in sickness and health". My recent ex did not like the first part, only the second. It was when I knew I needed to leave her, when she said in a fit of anger one day: "I don't want to have to push you around in a wheelchair when we get old". I keep thinking that the irony will be if it is her that will require pushing by someone and perhaps, with a stroke of good fortune, I won't. We just don't know do we?

Must love music. I love it all from rock to classic to hip hop to opera. Eclectic, I guess.

I would respect and honor a long-term, maintained recovery that is nurtured. I would not be able to handle someone actively practicing their disease of addiction. That is in my daily place of employment. Home needs to be a sanctuary.

I think that about covers it