I’ve found that a very strange thing now happens when people ask me about my relationship with R.

I have nothing to say.

“It’s great,” I told my sister Dani over gchat.

“We’re really good,” I said to Katie via text.

“I’m good, he’s good, it’s…

“Good?,” my friend Annie parroted back over brunch this past Saturday.

“Right,” I said. “I feel so lame saying that, but I just don’t really have any juicy gossip or crazy stories to report. The whole situation is just…you know.”

“Yep,” Annie said, “I call it the calm.”

(For the record it’s less a light bulb and more a visualization of my writing down the topic on the blog list I keep in my Moleskin.)

Annie is a NYC-based high-end wedding planner (Calm down. This post isn’t going there.) meaning she knows a thing or two about the concept of calm and the crazy of women.

“You can tell when a person is comfortable in a relationship,” she said, “because they don’t feel the need to over analyze and share every detail of it. They’re just…calm.”

I must have made some face the read, I don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about.

“Like, I remember you were very different when you were dating that bar tender. Totally different energy. You were more frenetic and stressed about it. Different energy. Remember?”

Not really because I mostly try not to remember dating that bar tender, but now that I can’t make you take back the fact that you mentioned it…

Later that same week I had lunch with my friend Megan who is in a similarly good-all-around situation.

“Everything is going well,” she told me.

“Us too,” I said.

“We just went to a wedding,” she told me.

“Us too,” I said.

“I feel like a robot,” she told me.

“Oh, don’t worry about it. My friend Annie calls it the calm,” I said. “Apparently it’s a very good thing.”

And then she gave me that same look I must have given Annie four days earlier.

I thought about how my convo with Megan could have gone if I wasn’t under this apparent spell of subdued-ness.

• Me: So we’ve been seeing a lot of each other, but I’m not sure I’m struggling with how to incorporate him into my friend group, you know?
• Megan: Totally. My guy and I are okay on that front, but I’m having major issues with the fact that he treats me really differently when we’re alone versus when we’re with his friends.
• Me: Ugh, totally.

And the dish-fest would proceed from there.

When I think back on it, those conversations were all one big sounding board sessions. I’d share little tid-bits under the, “so this is going on…” banner when what I really meant was, “the guy I’m dating does X. You think we’re doomed too, right?” The more insecure I felt about the dude the more I’d go on and on and on about every detail (read: clue) from our “relationship.”

Maybe part of all that sharing was because the girl across the table and I were in similar situations? It’s easy to go gossip for gossip with a friend who’s also spewing “and then he said this” vomit. Now I feel weird gushing about the latest nice thing R did for me to a currently single friend.

Or maybe it’s that a stable relationship is somehow more sacred than all those 3-monthers that came and went. Sometimes I start in on a story about R and realize I don’t want our quiet moments spread like trivial headlines. I don’t feel the need to justify why it’s good. I don’t need everyone else to be secure in it.

Meaning the calm may be more aptly called the mature or the not showy about it anymore.

I still don’t really know, but whatever it means, I’m glad I’m exhibiting it, by Annie’s standards at least. Now if I could only convince her to write a book about it and give me some form of credit…