Is true love more romantic than soulmate? I never knew what unconditional love was until I met her, but it didn’t come right away.  For most of my life, I considered “true love” to be the day you meet your “soulmate.”

When I came out as a transgender woman this year, I had no idea how my girlfriend would react to it.  I knew that I was potentially throwing my relationship away to be myself.  She is my everything, and coming out to her was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

I never knew what unconditional love was until I met her, but it didn’t come right away.  For most of my life, I considered “true love” to be the day you meet your “soulmate.”  When she and I began dating, I felt a level of comfort and camaraderie that I’d never felt before, but it wasn’t the familiar feeling of turmoil that I’d always experienced in my past relationships.  Due to my dating history, my only frame of reference was to associate emotional pain with love.  I figured that she couldn’t be my soulmate.  I was too happy for this to be love.

As time went on, I let my guard down and allowed myself to open up to her.  We were so compatible.  Conversations came so easily.  We never got bored with one another.  We’d spend all our free time together and it still wasn’t enough.  It wasn’t long until we moved in together.  And in less than a year after meeting her, we said “I love you” to each other.

But our relationship didn’t come without fights, arguments, and disagreements.  We’ve had to partake in uncomfortable conversations where we set boundaries and spoke our truths, something that I’d always been afraid to do with my previous partners, and the feeling was mutual for her.  We felt like it was more important to endure a small amount of discomfort and anger in order to preserve our relationship in the long-run and minimize the chances of future resentment.

I agreed to meet her family, something I couldn’t fathom doing with my other partners, because I would’ve been too worried about what they thought of me.  But while meeting her parents, I wasn’t nervous about making a good impression because my initial concern was to make her comfortable.  She was my priority.  Our relationship was my priority.  My potential discomfort just seemed to pale in comparison.