Author and Columnist
My muscles shall be mighty sore tomorrow, but at least I shall be in good shape to deal with ghosts and Amandas. And, in theory, I shall get strong, healthy, and slim.
Oh, boy, Amanda. Here is how I remember your interactions with her: you saw her at the Pagan Student Union, and she expressed interest in you. Did you especially want her to be interested in you? Not that I recall, but she was innocuous enough. She, at the very least, wasn't Kate, which you desperately needed. You are at least a month from the breakup at this point, likely more. I would like to say that this is your nadir, but it won't be.
You won't be fair to Amanda. She takes her first kiss from you. One of her friends "jokingly" -- but unrelentingly -- restrained you until she kissed you. She then bawled on you that her first kiss wasn't more special, but that was not your choice. You would have much preferred kissing snowflakes from her eyelashes, pushed by the romance of the moment more than your partner necessarily, but it would have been better for you both. Instead, you had the tension of your muscles trying to escape, the sudden panic, and then giving in to what she was doing if just so it could be over.
If the genders were reversed, it would have been evident to outsiders how it felt to you then: a violation and then comforting the one you blamed for it. But it wasn't Amanda's fault, in the end, because she didn't ask for it to happen that way. She didn't order her friend to restrain you. She was responsible but not wholly culpable. She just wanted to kiss you and did not understand how uncomfortable that made you. And you kissed her a few times after that, though she was always self-conscious about it. I don't know that you wanted to kiss her -- and you should only kiss people whom you want to kiss (you won't) -- but you did it because she had already popped that cork.
After that night, the friend who forced the kiss lectured and threatened you that you had better be good to Amanda. You could not believe how he thought that he had any right to say those things after what he had done.
It meant more to her than it did to you. You both had vulnerabilities, and they would have only hurt her more in the long run. You could not have let yourself be what she deserved, at the very least her first boyfriend. As is often the case with these, I wonder what would have happened if you gave her an uneasy month before breaking it off. How would this have twisted your fate to come?
It would have been worse for her, which mattered more than any disaster it would have prevented you. You could take the hit, and she was not ready to.
Miss Kate invited me to New Paltz to watch puppets. Let me tell you, if there were puppets, I missed them.
I wish you would stop hanging out with her. It isn't doing you any good. You are not friends, particularly as you alternate puppyish fondness and snapping at her.
Then Kate took me to her friends' house up the street and made me feel guilty about crying with/to/on her yesterday.
Oh, so Amanda crying on you is deeply uncomfortable, but you weeping on Kate is somehow fine?
If I remember the right crying jag -- you had a few -- this would be the one where, after you went home, she went to that selfsame house and spent the night with one of her "boys." Her excuse later, as I recall, was that your crying on her lap made her aroused. (It also may have been that this affair pushed her farther from her feelings for you. Thus, to her, it was a blessing.) You don't find this out for at least a few more months and burn your friendship with Matrona in learning it (and wishing it were false), but it did happen.
Allow me to repeat: You need to stay away from Kate. She is not your friend, and you can't pretend that you are okay with the relationship you two have at present.
I would not have ever had the same conversation with, say, Alison than I would have with Kate. Very different friends who offer me very different friendships.
That is because Alison is actually your friend. Yes, you dated a few times in high school, but her friendship is present and honest. She does want to have sex with you once when you go to her dorm after a rerun of the Kate and Thomm Drama Hour. You are emotionally raw, a foot and a half away from her on her bed, and you know. If she made the slightest move toward it, it is more likely that you would have succumbed than rebuffed her. (You may have rebuffed her ordinarily, but not in that state.) But she doesn't make that move, and you do not even kiss.
Because Alison is actually your friend. She would have been your friend even if you had slept together -- though it is probably best that you didn't. Again, had you, it might have shaken you from Kate's grip one way or another. You wouldn't have dated Alison again, but you wouldn't have felt a need to imagine that you were loyal to a woman who no longer wanted that.
I am trying to cope further with the Kate situation so that I can someday actually want to be with someone who is not her. It's not working very well, no matter how she makes me cry.
You know what would help? Not being around Kate. If she is near you, particularly in the same room alone with you, you can imagine that you can charm her into wanting you again. But she is already leading the collegiate life she wants to. She keeps you around out of attachment, but she will never genuinely want to be in a relationship with you again.
I tried to just "date" with girl Amanda. And I had a lot of fun with her, when she was not trying to "date" me. Especially the freezing together and playing on large stone chess boards.
This will reoccur, so let me make it clear to you what is going on. You do not feel invested in Amanda and do not want to feel invested in her. She isn't on sight a nearly mythical creature that you have built up in your mind, so you are not willing to throw yourself in with abandon.
But that's not the core of your issue. Amanda is not your friend. There was no attempt at friendship before she decided that she wanted to kiss you. You had never built up enough of the small foundations of knowing her before her friend jerked your arms behind your back so she could steal her kiss.
You wanted to try to get to know her, but she was impatient, and you were too weak to stop her. So, nothing happened beyond kisses and guilt.
Amanda, as I recall, did not want to be Amanda. She had some fairy alter ego in her head who had all her gifts and none of her flaws. When you made some glib comment about preferring Amanda to fiction, she yelled at you and cried again. Maybe you two were on the same side in that, wanting her to be something she wasn't.
But I don't dare burden her with me until I have worked through all of this fully.
Even then, I am not sure she would be the one I'd burden...
When you have the proper infatuation, you don't lay this sort of narrative groundwork. When it feels right -- even if it is not right -- you do not foreshadow it not working out.