...but not a particularly happy one.

Don't get me wrong, there's been plenty of happy moments. I've had nice presents (a huge thank you to many of my friends, and to my wonderful girlfriend). I've been shopping and spent a large sum of money on books, which is always good. I started the day in bed with Helen and have returned to it once or twice since ;) I've even been offered a threesome at some point this week, amusingly with both of the other participants independently asking me within an hour of each other if I would like to try to set something up with the other person :) There has been a lot of Good Stuff today.

Still, I'm sad; that's my baseline state, and when there's nothing actively happening to cheer me up, I return to it.

I've been putting off writing any detail in my journal lately about what's going on in my life, which has tended to make the personal entries a bit cryptic and emo over the last month. I really don't like doing that - this is my journal, and if my head is a mess then this is exactly where I should be trying to write it all down and work it all out. However. Although this is my journal, and I should be able to write whatever I like about my personal life... there's the tricky issue of how much it's polite to write about other people's personal lives. When the other people are so completely integral to what's happening to your life, it can be impossible to write about the mess inside your own head without talking about their personal lives too.

I've decided over the last few days that I'm going to have to write about what's been happening lately, despite other people being heavily involved, because it's just been too important to me to leave it as a few cryptic posts and a succession of downbeat mood settings.

I'm going to give people made-up names to give some vague hint of politeness to the whole thing of discussing their personal lives, but they're going to be fairly obvious made-up names if you know the people involved. I'm sure all our mutual friends already know 3/4 of what's gone on anyway, and maybe it'll make a bit more sense if they have the other 1/4 to finish the picture. The rest of you can just read it for entertainment value, or because you care about the things that shape my life, or out of intense boredom :)



Earlier this year I met a girl. We'll call her Katy, or K. The first time I met her I don't actually remember very well - the main memory I took away (from a meeting with an extremely attractive girl) was that she had a tattoo a bit like one of mine. I can only claim that the loud music in the nightclub we met in must have addled my brains considerably. *cough* (The second time I met her I was considerably more alert, and therefore rambled incoherently at her for a bit, which is one of my default reactions to meeting attractive girls.)

Anyway, this girl is part of the social scene which revolves around Planet Angel, a group which I've found a lot of really good friends in over the last year or so. So I've been seeing her around quite a bit at various clubs, after-parties, etc.

It turns out that this girl and her long-term bf, let's call him Matthew (or M) had decided to dip their toes in the scary waters of poly. When K ended up in bed with my girlfriend, I thought it might be a good time to express my own interest. This all worked out rather nicely over the next few weeks, with some time spent hugging and kissing at various parties, and then a wonderfully snuggly and happy night and morning when K stayed at my place.

Unfortunately, that night we did do something we weren't meant to do; we shagged, going against a very explicit request from M that we didn't do so. Understandably he was pretty upset about that. The next six weeks were a bit hellish, as both me and K had realised that in fact we'd fallen for each other, and now we weren't allowed to be alone together because M was so upset about us breaching his trust.

M turned out to be a far nicer guy than I really deserved at that point. He kept in touch with me by email, and we discussed the issues surrounding the emotional mess we were all in extensively. In the end, he decided to allow me and K to start seeing each other again.

By this point though, K was incredibly busy working on a hobby project that was eating up all her free time, so although we were allowed to see each other, it was a bit theoretical for the moment. Still, a great relief compared to thinking I was never going to see her properly again a few weeks before that! We spent a lot of time every day hugging and kissing via the rather unsatisfactory mediums of text messages, emails, and Facebook applications. Better than nothing, and it did at least let us each know the other person was still crazy about them, even if time and distance was not making that easy to show just now :)

K and me also got fairly snuggly again in a few snatched moments at parties and other random evenings with friends, and M and me spent considerable time talking our way back to a point where he was going to trust me to the same extent that he had done once before, and be willing to let K stay with me again. We'd finally got there, and we'd also started discussing the possibility of me asking K out officially (remember that bit, it's relevant to the original question), when the unexpected occurred.

K totally lost interest in me. One day, dozens of text messages and Facebook hugs and kisses a day, the next day I'm being completely blanked at a very small party (when there are only four people in the room, it's hard not to notice one of them avoiding your company). This would have been quite heavily confusing, if it were not for the fact that the reason seemed fairly obvious... she was wrapped around another guy. Let's call him Steve, or S. This development just made it incredibly upsetting instead of confusing, of course. Hell, I'm poly, she's poly... she didn't need to dump me to take up with someone else, and certainly not that abruptly... so what had I done that was so incredibly off-putting that I'd been dropped at such a ferocious speed?

Okay, so it was still fairly confusing. Still is fairly confusing actually, because for the next few weeks, she didn't talk to me. Minimal polite replies to text messages and emails, no friendly online interactions, basically I was being blanked. As you can imagine, this level of rejection did not settle my mind particularly. Welcome to my emo LJ.

I finally got to speak to her last week, and she sort of explained what had gone on from her point of view. Apparently I did something to piss her off a bit on the Saturday morning that weekend (she has a fair point here, I did do something rather thoughtless), and so she spent a good chunk of Saturday ignoring me because she was pissed off. Now, here's where it gets trickier... after that, she apparently kept ignoring me because I was upset by her ignoring me, and (a) she finds me much less attractive when I'm not happy, and (b) she felt bad that she was the reason I wasn't happy.

If you think this is an insanely minor (and worryingly self-referential/recursive) reason for what seemed like a really nice relationship-to-be to turn into a screeching trainwreck in less than 24 hours, then you'd not be alone. Like I said, I'm still confused. And sad. And strongly inclined to think that developments with S coming along at just the exact time and day that K was going off of me might have rather more to do with it than she's realised, or at least more than she's admitting to me.

So, there's the reason I've been sad the last few weeks - but why today particularly? At least she's talking to me again now, and there even seems some chance that we can retrieve the friendship we had before things got messy.

Well. As mentioned earlier, I was going to ask K out officially, ask her if she'd like to be my girlfriend. I started discussing the details with M a month ago, just before things all went horribly wrong, and it quickly became obvious that the timeframe we were looking at for resolving our discussions would very probably mean that a really cool time for me to do the asking would be on my birthday - something of an amazingly nice birthday present to myself, if you like. This would have been fairly easy to do, as K had taken my birthday week off work so that she could spend some of it with me, including my birthday.

Instead, today/tonight she's in bed with S, and I'm spending the day trying not to think about what I had planned for today just a few short weeks ago.

So yeah... I didn't quite get what I wanted for my birthday this year.



That slightly pathetic tale said and done... Helen has just got out of the bath, and we're going back to bed again now. To read our new books. Honest.

It's not all bad, this birthday. It's had its moments.


Just not that moment.