This is my New to Who Story. Nothing remarkable to the rest of the world, but so very important to me. 

The summer of 2009 started out pretty unremarkable. I was a year out of college and living back with my parents, a less than ideal situation. Don’t get me wrong, they are lovely people and we get along pretty well, but no 23 year old wants to be living back with their parents. 

The community theater in my town was doing a production The Who’s Tommy (which I only just now realize is hilarious) which I was cast in. An old friend from high school (back from college for the summer) was playing Cousin Kevin. I swear this is all relevant.

See, we both grew up in a tiny, tiny town. So small there wasn’t a taco bell, a mall, or a movie theater within 30 miles. Everything in the town closed by about 9 pm excluding the CVS and Safeway which were open 24 hours, but who wants to hang out there? When we’d get out of rehearsal at 10 pm there would be literally nothing to do. 

After the first rehearsal, I invited my friend over to watch this show which was my new obsession… Bones. At first, he would come over every night to watch it with me, but then he started coming over before rehearsal, too. We made it through Bones before the first month of summer was up. 

We were left without our main “reason” to hang out beyond being friends, but it was kinda awkward to just hang out the two of us because we were starting to have feelings for each other. Under normal circumstances, that would be great, but there were many reasons for us not to be together. Including an awkward situation involving my ex earlier in that summer. It was an impossible situation with no solution. That’s when he mentioned a show he wanted to watch, but didn’t really know anyone else that would be into it. It sounded weird, but I said I’d give it a shot.

Doctor Who.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really like the first episode. I didn’t hate it, but I also wasn’t that excited to continue the series. It was cheesy, Billie Piper bugged me, and the cg was TERRIBLE, but we put the next episode on because there was literally nothing else to do. And I didn’t want to stop hanging out with my friend. “The End of the World” was when I began to fall in love with the show. I began to see Rose as the Doctor saw her. I started to identify with her and this impossible man that came into her life, changing it so completely. 

I cried when Nine left, but I pretty instantly fell in love with Tenn. What’s not to love about him? When he met Rose as Nine, he was broken, but as Tenn he started to heal. Through Rose, he began to heal. When Rose and the Doctor were split up in alternate universes, I sobbed uncontrollably. As the summer was coming to an end, it was impossible to not identify with the situation. My friend was going to leave for school soon and I would be stuck back home, nothing about our situation being solved. 

We caught up with the show before he left. We left off right before the Tennant specials. I was devastated because I knew Tennant and my friend were leaving me soon. My friend went back to school and I knew I was in love. I fell in love watching Doctor Who, but I was the Rose to his Doctor. We could never be together. I was going to have to give him up because of distance and other factors we couldn’t cross. 

A week later, he told me how he felt about me and we decided to screw the consequences (I should probably be clear that us being together wasn’t illegal, just socially awkward). We didn’t want to end up like Rose and the Doctor. Three years later, we are still together. We still watch Doctor Who together because it helped us work through so much shit in our lives. We got a happy ending, even if the Doctor didn’t.