What It’s Like Living With A Witch

Hello everyone, Jeffrey here! Today I’d like to share some of my experience of living with an actual, green witch with you! As most of you know, Bren is a traditional green witch and we have been living together for over three years now.  We hear a lot of questions of people who are curious what my experience is and well, here we are. But before I tell you what it’s actually like, I think a little bit of an introduction is in order.

How I met my witchy girlfriend

Some of you might know that I’m the writer of a scifi trilogy called The Shaedon Resurgence and my books were published by Celtica Publishing. At the time I was contributing to their newsletter and I did quite a few interviews with bloggers. Bren’s name had come up a few times and I decided to send her a chat message on Facebook, but I didn’t really know if she was actually a blogger, or not. One thing led to another and before we knew it, we were chatting a lot, after a strange initial one month silence between us. I’ll save the entire origin story of our relationship for a novel, but this is the basic story. We met through Facebook and ended up falling in love when we finally met each other in August of 2018.

Moving in and moving on

At the end of 2018 I asked Bren if she wanted to move in with me and she eventually said:”Yes.” It was quite early, after we had only been together for three months, but it just felt good, we were both adults and if things wouldn’t work out, we’d both have a relatively easy way out, without much consequence. It turned out that things worked out very well and we’re even engaged to be married now! But I digress, when Bren first moved in, I didn’t really know she was a witch (and she had been since she was 13 years old!). It was not like she was keeping this big secret and would come out of the (broom)closet one day, as more people do, but she was a bit afraid, because I am a huge science nut. I was a bit more adamant about how I am a firm believer in the scientific method back then, but I also admitted that I believed that there’s more to life than what science tells us. We’re basically little more than evolved apes and our monkey brains really can’t grasp everything we see. I’ve always said that I believe there might be more than we can see through our senses and I have an open mind towards everything. At the same time, I’m also a skeptic and I love to question everything. I suppose in hindsight this might have been a bit intimidating to Bren, but as we spent more time together she finally opened up more and more. She slowly started introducing little things in the house and some day, we had a little altar in our living room. I didn’t even realise it was a small altar and just thought Bren was addicted to burning candles.

I think where I differ with most other guys is what I said earlier, I have an open mind and I’m naturally curious about all kinds of things, so I never forbade Bren to do anything she wanted. I was simply curious what she would introduce next. Looking back I think it’s exactly because she was so gradually introducing me to her lifestyle that I wasn’t overwhelmed, or even shocked that she told me she was a witch. Maybe it was one of those classic moments where a child tells their parents that they’re gay and everyone is like: “Yeah, we already knew that.” I’m not really sure when it was exactly that Bren actually used the term Witch to describe herself, but to me she was still just the same person. In fact, I only loved her more for being so open about it, and ultimately it also got me interested.

What got me interested in witchcraft

Bren told me a lot of people are interested in what got me into witchcraft, or in what capacity I’m a witch, or am not. Well, it’s complicated… I don’t necessarily call myself a witch, in fact I like to call myself a Modern Day Stoic. What’s nice about Stoicism (please note the capital S) is that those old dudes in Greece/Rome back in the day were all about living in accordance with nature. Sure, they may have meant Human nature when referring to nature, but Bren, as a Traditional Green Witch is also living in accordance, or harmony with nature. I brought this up recently and I think this is one of the main reasons why we go together so well. Our approach may differ, but ultimately our goals are aligned.

So, I don’t call myself a Witch, who knows, I might some day, but I don’t really want to label myself as a person too much (although I realise I do, by calling myself a Stoic). Bren introduced me to a whole lot of things, starting with all of the Pagan festivals. What I really love about all of these is the mindfulness part of them. Doing things in the moment and putting effort into the rituals can really help guide you through the year and what’s more is that these happen to align with my own practice of making annual goals and how I approach every year. We have celebrated every festival and Bren invited me to participate in them as well, first I was mostly just an observer, but the more we celebrate them, the more I try to be prepared and mindful about them. I intend to start writing about all of them as well, explaining how I experience them from what I hope is a unique perspective to others, who are more ingrained in pagan/witchcraft practices than me.

And what shies me away from it… 

The parts I’m not that interested in are rooted in beliefs that are closer to religion (mainly Wicca practices) and superstition, and I’m glad Bren is not a religious person either. I don’t really believe in things such as bad luck, good fortune and curses. This is where my Stoic foundation takes over for me and one of my main principles that it is not the things that happen are good or bad, but our interpretation of them make them good or bad. I see a lot of what comes on my path as an opportunity to learn and grow and while a lot of people might consider some of the things that happened to me were bad, I tend to see the side where I came out on top in the end. A prime example is my burn-out, which was initially hard, but ultimately gave me the opportunity to grow and become more vocal about my own feelings.

Every day a moment to learn

What I love about my relationship with Bren is that every day gives us the opportunity to learn and grow. We are each other’s biggest supporters and each of our unique experiences and philosophies of life give us a different perspective on things. I’m very proud of how much Bren has grown over these three and a half years of our relationship and seeing her grow.

When our relationship started Bren was already a book dragon, but she was mostly into fiction reading. This took a turn over the past year and now we both read a lot more non-fiction than fiction. What I love about this is that whenever Bren learns something new from the books she reads, she shares it with me and vice versa. I think one of our biggest mottos is that you never should stop learning, because this is how you keep evolving and reinventing yourself to become the best possible version of yourself that you can be.

And they lived happily ever after…

Not many guys can say that they’re (going to be) married to a witch and that every day they come back from work the witch is already waiting for them on her chair. I suppose I’m truly living in a fairy tale and I’m loving every moment of it!

Of course, we can imagine that you guys have plenty of questions, so please feel free to ask them and we’ll bundle them up into a sort of Q&A! And answer your questions in an upcoming blog! 🙂

Much magical love,

Jeffrey