Grown Energy

I'm just now realizing how much being remembered matters.

I am 46 years old.

I have lived several lives. I have paid off debt, acquired new debt, survived political cycles, bodily betrayals, heartbreaks that felt architectural, and at least one era where I ate dinner standing up over the sink because sitting down felt like a commitment I couldn’t make.

Which is to say: I wasn’t shopping in the 28-year-old aisle.

And yet.

Somewhere between my knees popping like bubble wrap and my tolerance for nonsense reaching absolute zero, I found myself dating a 28-year-old man who is — without irony — more of an adult than almost every man I’ve dated in the recent past.

Let me be clear about what this is not.

This is not a cougar fantasy.

This is not a “he keeps me young” situation.

This is not a story about me teaching someone how to live.

If anything, this is a story about me realizing how many grown men I’ve dated who were, spiritually and operationally, just tall children with credit scores.

Because age does not equal adulthood. Accountability does.

I’ve dated men in their forties and fifties who needed reminders to pay bills, make appointments, regulate their emotions, and apologize without turning it into a TED Talk about their trauma. Men who treated partnership like an optional upgrade instead of a baseline expectation. Men deeply committed to the idea of themselves as “good guys,” but allergic to the follow-through that makes that true.

And then here comes this man, calmly doing the wildest things imaginable: He communicates. He shows up when he says he will. He takes responsibility without being chased down. He is curious instead of defensive. He is emotionally present without needing a parade.

I kept waiting for the trick. The reveal. The moment where I’d discover he was actually three raccoons in a trench coat.

But no.

He just… did the work.

Which forced me to confront something deeply uncomfortable: a lot of men my age and older were never required to grow up. They were allowed to coast on charm, proximity to power, and the assumption that women would quietly carry the emotional load forever.

This man doesn’t confuse intensity with intimacy. He doesn’t outsource his emotional regulation to me. He doesn’t treat my boundaries like a personal attack. He isn’t trying to catch up to me. He’s walking beside me.

And that has required me to unlearn the idea that ease means boredom, that safety means settling, that drama is proof of depth. Peace isn’t dull. It’s just unfamiliar when you’ve spent years negotiating with chaos.

I don’t know what this is. And neither does he.

That’s not a problem — it’s a shared understanding. There’s something steady about not rushing to name a thing just to make ourselves feel safer inside it.

What I do know is how it feels.

Like the time I was at his house and he suggested we read together. I assumed — reasonably — that he meant we’d each grab a book and sit quietly side by side. The kind of nerdy domestic cuteness I deeply enjoy. I was already picturing the silence. The proximity. The mutual respect for paragraphs.

Instead, he opened his book and started reading out loud to me. A full chapter. Calm. Unselfconscious. Present. Then he handed me the book so I could read the next one. And we went back and forth like that for a while — trading chapters, voices, attention — no phones, no performance, no rush. Just two people sharing a story in the softest possible way.

It was romantic and lovely and completely unexpected.

And then there was the morning he casually asked how I usually eat my eggs. If I liked cheese in them. I answered without thinking much of it. A few minutes later, he got up, walked into my kitchen, and reappeared about twenty minutes later with a plate of scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon, and strawberries.

He didn’t ask where anything was. He didn’t ask how to hold a pan. He didn’t narrate the effort or fish for praise. He just handled it.

And in that moment, something in me clocked how accustomed I’d become to weaponized incompetence. To men who turned basic care into a committee meeting. To a thousand questions that were really just a way to opt out of responsibility.

This wasn’t that.

This was attention. Competence. Follow-through.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that seen — or that gently taken care of — in a way that didn’t make me smaller, but instead let me rest.

I saw a meme earlier today that said love is the way someone remembers you — the tiny details you thought were throwaway, but weren’t.

Now let’s not get it twisted. I’m not calling this love. I don’t know what this is yet. I just know what it feels like to be held in someone’s memory while I’m still in the room.

But here’s the part that surprised me most.

Even if nothing else happens with this person — even if this is temporary, unfinished, or simply a chapter — that’s not the point. The point is that this experience cracked something open in me. It showed me a truth I hadn’t fully allowed myself to see before: that I had been tolerating far less care, effort, and presence than I deserve.

This clarity didn’t just arrive as sweetness. It arrived as contrast. It helped me finally name and release a truly toxic situationship I had been clinging to out of habit, hope, and history. And for that — regardless of what this becomes — I will be forever grateful.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to.

I am not less myself here. I am not performing ease. I am not bracing for disappointment. I am simply present.

And whatever this is — unnamed, unfolding, unforced — it has clarified something essential for me: adulthood isn’t an age. It isn’t experience alone. It isn’t how long you’ve been alive. It’s whether you know how to be with someone. Whether you notice. Whether you follow through. Whether care shows up without being requested.

I don’t know what this will become.

But I know what it already is: steady, surprising, and clarifying.

And at 46, that feels like enough to stay curious.