Author and Columnist
She has taken to vehemently defend people she hardly knows over tiny things and attacking me because of it.
I sense this was the nature of your relationship with Kate. She loved you, but she did not always like you. Given the nature of these letters-turned-entries, I cannot say that you can be held entirely blameless.
Still, I don't exactly know what this was about beyond trying to get some emotional distance from you. Once, you suggested that you saw your relationship with Kate as the two of you against the world. She said that she didn't want to be against the world, but that isn't how you meant it. You thought you were a team, which she did not.
Perhaps oddest, she held back for about a week rather than just telling me that some jerk tried to pick her up at a party. I get hit on a lot, and I rebuff those would-be suitors. Yet she just shyly looked away and ended up getting kissed on the cheek and asked if she wanted to go back to his place and later confessing to JB that she felt violated by the whole situation.
There are levels to my responses to you. There is the act, your recollection of it at the time, then my reply decades in your future. Into this, we are adding the additional layers of abstraction that this is something that happened to Kate that she waited a week to tell you for her own reasons. That week may have been one of reconsidering and rephrasing. She may have told you the version of the truth that she wanted you to know because knowing more would have affected your relationship.
Simply put, I do not know now (nor do I expect you knew then) how much of this was objective. Did this event occur as described? Was Kate more involved than she told you? In a few more months, she will leave you so that she can better enjoy her college experience with more people. This entry speaks to a young woman trying to break free of a relationship, vacillating between wanting to be in love with you or in lust with many opportunities.
Did she kiss this man willingly? Was there more? It does not matter now. It is all a matter of my drawing lines between things to make patterns. You chose to post this entry not merely because it was a goodly number of words but also backed up some thesis that existed by the time you started this site properly.
Or it could be exactly how she described it. Women are not always given the power to tell men off for their advances. They freeze. They are socialized to keep men placated. Kate, especially, may not have had the confidence to protect herself beyond looking away. Maybe this is all that happened. It does not bear further scrutiny.
I feel that it is symptomatic of a greater problem in our relationship, and I know not what that problem is. But I am very confused and frustrated.
You know. You are frustrated, but I suspect you are well aware. You just see the danger in admitting it to yourself.
And when I get like this, I am not in the mood for even cuddling with her. I mostly just want to be best friends until things clear up. And I know that that would only confuse her further and make this situation more difficult.
This, however, is worth noting. More often than I would like to recount, you try to keep things sexually and romantically usual with women you are dating because you feel it would make things more difficult in the long run. You will give yourself in ways that you do not want to, then hate yourself that it didn't help. You will hate that you allow yourself to be used because they would pull away further if you didn't.
These short-term bandaids only let the infection spread. You can't heal or more fully experience the relationship because you are submitting yourself to not trigger your abandonment issues. Lovers don't respect a bowed head.
All mud-luscious and puddle wonderful. And I want her to be as happy. And I feel that she isn't. Hell, a blind deaf person on anesthesia could sense that.
It is not your responsibility to make her happy. You can be there. You can let her know that you hope she can come to you. But you cannot make her happy. That is her burden alone. There were many times in her life that she was depressed--before, during, and after your romantic relationships--and she mostly knew to seek the help she needed.
You will cling to her for months after she leaves for other beds. Part of it is that you think you can compromise yourself into a relationship with her again (you cannot), but part is that you want her to be happy. You devote too much of yourself to helping her with that when she is, not surprisingly, getting better comforted elsewhere.
Let people take ownership over their emotions and the ramifications, you included.