Nog and I met on h2g2 on March 2, 2003 (his 50th birthday), when he showed up on my h2g2 personal page to offer me a bit of advice – I had just recently joined and clearly hadn’t quite got the hang of the place yet. A year and a half later we met for the first time in person and, after Nog spent a month’s holiday here in Sevilla, we decided to take the plunge and embark on a living-together relationship, beginning in September 2004.

Every September on the equinox we’ve renewed our vows, with each year bringing new variations. And this past September was no different, except the vows actually changed quite a lot, with the emphasis on friendship for this year. And while we are still sticking to those vows, we have also started to ‘let go’ of some of the other stuff. We weren’t really sure at first which way the new friendship vows would take us, but it turns out that we both feel more like ourselves being friends, rather than trying to maintain an intimate capital R relationship. Had things been different when we first met in person we might have discovered this before moving in together, but it didn’t make sense for Nog to move here from the UK and have to get his own flat. In any case, we don’t actually wish it had been different because the way we bonded by living together straight away was very special and not something that happens every day.

One of the things that kept us from honestly looking at and admitting to how the Relationship thang wasn’t really working for us (until last September) was that we do actually love each other very much. We’re also great at sharing a home together. We know each other practically inside-out – and still like spending time together – and we also share a lot of common interests.

We didn’t want to lose any of that by ‘splitting up’, but we also didn’t want to become one of those complacent couples who ‘settle’ for a comfy and unchallenging life together just because it’s better than being alone. So we’ve decided to do neither of those things and instead let our Relationship develop into the very deep and real friendship we think it was probably always meant to be, without other expectations attached to it. Which means no dramatic and messy all-or-nothing break-up, and that we can keep sharing casa az together (each with our own room now) and continue to share our lives, being there for each other and having a dear friend close by. It just didn’t make sense to throw the baby out with the bath water, you know?

And yeah, we have thought about what happens if either of us meets someone else. But though it feels good to have that option open to us again, we don’t see that happening in the very near future, so we’ll just deal with that if/when it happens.

Nog & I wanted to take a bit of time to get used to the idea ourselves before ‘going public’, to see how things were going to work out – mostly because we didn’t want it to sound like a negative change. And now we can honestly say that it isn’t and that we are both quite happy with how we are working things out. And it certainly isn’t the end of the Nog & az story.

So stay tuned. . .