That girl

I have a friend, let's call him Ted, who is lovely but is the only person I know with a bigger ego than me. 

Seriously, this guy has some balls on him. 

We were having a conversation the other day about his new girlfriend. A "woodland water nymph" called Autumn, who's description I couldn't reply to straight away because I wanted to vomit. I'm sure she's lovely, but I'm also sure she isn't a character from Hercules. 

He was talking about how he was worried he had offended another girl he was seeing, polygamy being his previous preference, and at first I reminded him that it wasn't his job to police other people's emotions. You can't control how other people feel. 

An ironic statement coming from me because I can't even control how I feel. 

Anyway, he was saying she got upset because she saw that he'd changed his relationship status to "In a relationship" on Facebook. Yes, that's right, in 2025 he managed to upset someone via his relationship status. Incase it wasn't abundantly clear, this man is a millennial. 

As I said at first, I was on his sid,e but when he began to tell me the full story, I realised that he had reason to feel bad about himself. He'd been a total dick. He told me how he'd discussed his "boundaries" with her. Not having to see her every time she was in town, not "presenting" as a couple and other things that I've buried in my subconscious because I was so offended on this woman's behalf. Yes it's perfectly acceptable to set boundaries, no it was absolutely none of my business, but as a fellow woman I felt she deserved better.

I've been in this situation many, many times before. An old friend of mine broke my heart when I asked him to be my valentine and he told me he had a girlfriend. He told me he'd known I liked me for a while and should have been more careful about how "couply" we were acting. This man knew about my condition more than most, and yet for some reason chose to manipulate my emotions. 

Tedd told me that when he discussed these boundaries with this woman, she was okay with it, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that she shouldn't have been. As someone with cripplingly low self-esteem who's argument for staying with her ex was that "he doesn't hit me" like a previous boyfriend had, I know what it's like to hide your feelings about a particular situation. If she didn't care she wouldn't have been upset about his status, and if he'd care about her he would have told her about the aforementioned "woodland water nymph". It's one thing to not care, but it's a very different thing to act like you care when you don't. 

Situationships are rife within society and I've been in my fair share. A particularly denial-rich one of mine involved me taking my "fwb" to a dinner party and meeting his friends. Throughout the three years we were together, he repeatedly told me he didn't have feelings for me and I repeatedly stayed in these bizarre situations where we acted like a couple. I don't honestly know if I was happy at the time, but I know I wasn't overly jazzed when he randomly ended things because he got a girlfriend. I wasn't his one, I was the one for now. 

Moving forward, I'm determined to learn from these mistakes, especially after I allowed my most recent boyfriend to keep me a secret. Unless someone wants to shower me in love and tell the world that we're together, I'm not going to enter into a relationship with them. No more excuses, no more accommodations, I deserve to be with someone who loves me to the nth degree, and I'm not going to settle until I find someone who does. 

Stay safe on the road

Jess