Bear, Meet Mollie …

I was so smug. And I was smug, wasn’t I? I had it all. My dream career. A life I love. It’s not always easy, don’t get me wrong, but it was getting there. I was making it. I hadn’t made it, but I was getting to where I wanted to be.

Work and life, in general, going brilliantly, my love life was also going pretty well. I’d found a man. One who I’d fallen head over heels in love with. One who’d ticked every box as far as I was concerned, and one I couldn’t imagine ever living without. Already. He’d never lied to me. I trusted him implicitly. I had no reason to ever doubt him or his commitment to me. Until a few days ago.

I’d pressed “publish” on my last blog post. Within a few minutes, Bear had messaged me.

“Why have you been so shitty with me recently?” 

Big red alarm bells went off instantly. It was either a really big coincidence, or he’d read my blog and reacted. It was about Brown Eyes. About me admitting I still had a shred of feeling left for him …? Of course he was going to react.

“Because you’re pissing me off.” 

I wasn’t exactly prepared for his response …

I read the text and everything around me went blurry. He’s been reading my blog. He read it. He’s been reading it.

I put the phone down, scared to touch it or respond. I didn’t know what to say. What was I meant to say to that? I was sorry that he’d read that, but he didn’t need to read it at all. My blog is anonymous. He’s not meant to know about it. I mean, he does know about it, but I didn’t realise he actually knew about it. I didn’t write it for him to read.

Plus, at the same time, I was really pissed. More than pissed, I felt betrayed. Totally and utterly betrayed. He read my blog. He’d been reading my blog. He kept saying to me, over and over again, “I’ll never read your blog. That’s your thing. Even if I was to find it, I wouldn’t read it. I know how important it is to you.” 

I believed him. I didn’t tell him more than he needed to know, and I definitely didn’t drop hints as to where he could find it, but he knows of it. I asked advice sometimes, and for his opinion too. I’m pretty sure I said it before – I thought I had the best of both worlds. A boyfriend who understood my blog but didn’t pry.

I thought I had it all. 

I didn’t. Even worse … he’d misread the entire blog post completely. After he read those 1,500 words, all he picked up on was the fact I apparently still loved Brown Eyes. I don’t even think I said that. I had a look back over it, and I don’t think it could have been anything further from that! I couldn’t understand how he’d taken “I still love him” from the post. Re-reading it over and over again, I couldn’t get it. I didn’t understand.

We argued. We ignored each other. We hung up on each other. He was angry. I was angry. We were getting nowhere. We kept up with this charade until the early hours of the morning. We split up. I can’t get my head around the fact he was reading my blog.

When I woke up the next morning, I was really angry. Betrayed. Upset. Irritated. My eyes were so puffy for crying 8 hours straight, I could barely open them. I had no voice left. I couldn’t breathe through my nose. I looked a fright, and I didn’t feel that much better. I started thinking about things, about things that had been said or had happened over the last few weeks that seemingly coincided with stuff I’d said/done on the blog. I asked him questions, and it was during the questions that he got really angry. In short, this:

“Listen, I’ve said I’m sorry. I can’t change it. But it’s obvious you don’t want this anymore, so just dump me and be done with it.”

He said this over and over and over again. In fact, he’s been saying this for a really long time. Every time we have a slight tiff, that’s the first thing he says – “If you’re going to dump me, dump me.” 

I can’t work out if he wants to dump me but doesn’t want to come across as the bad guy, or if he’s telling me to accept him as he is, bad behaviour and all, or move on. Neither of those options are pleasant.

I called him an asshole. I never name-call. But HE read my blog, HE misread it entirely, and now HE can’t accept the consequences for HIS behaviour. He had been an asshole. I have never been anything but honest about Brown Eyes to Bear. And now he’s accusing me of leading him and his son on, loving Brown Eyes all along and just waiting for him to take me back. As though I never had feelings for him – Bear –  at all. I’m pretty sure his exact words were “We mean jack-shit”.

Oh, and then he tried to out me. He tweeted my blog from his own personal account. Fuck. A very-strongly worded text later and the Tweet was gone, but that’s not the point. He tried to out me.

Not only that, he actually threatened to tell Brown Eyes the lot …

Well, I guess that’s what dating a paranoid schizophrenic [edit: someone with borderline personality disorder] is like. There is a very big part of me that’s wondering if this is such a good idea? Too fucking late now.

We ignored each for a while. I thought about some stuff. Really thought about some stuff. Blog stuff, boyfriend stuff, life stuff, you know. How important is my blog? How important is my boyfriend? Can I have a blog and a boyfriend at the same time? The Dom once told me I couldn’t have both – I couldn’t have one without him knowing about the other. Is that true?

Is it really that big of a deal if Bear reads it? Would it have been that big a deal if I had been “outed”. I’m starting to see a lot of dating blogs not that dissimilar to mine, and they’re not all anonymous. Some of them are very publicly out there. And, let’s think about things from a slightly different perspective too. The stuff I’m embarrassed about is the stuff that happened to me in the past, isn’t it? The last five years of this blog have been my transition from my mid-twenties into my thirties, and I definitely think I’ve grown up a lot. I’m not the same person I was when I first starting writing this, and I think that should stand for something. Why am I so paranoid about it? Why do I hide?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to suddenly come out from behind the shadows because everyone else is doing it, but is Bear reading my blog really the worst thing to happen? So what if he reads stuff that happened with past fellas? He’s dumb as fuck if he does, but so what? He’ll read that I once accidentally shit the bed. Ha! And farted … Or about how I went a bit nuts over one guy who was very clearly playing me for a fool. Or how I had some really great sex. With him. A few others too, but with him lately. Or how I loved one ex so much, my heart broke for over two years. Who cares? He’s already a total raging lunatic, so I hardly think anything he could read in here is going to shock him much.

As much as he was a cunt, and he really was a cunt too, is him reading my blog worth us breaking up? Because once I’d told him he’d gotten the wrong end of the stick entirely after reading my last post, he didn’t want to break up. He apologised … profusely. But did I really want to throw in the towel just because he’d read my blog? That feels a little pointless? I know he’s a paranoid, jealous pain in the ass, but he’s really not that bad. Well, okay, sometimes he is, but I am too. And this all started because of me and the whole Brown Eyes situation. I shouldn’t have been so open about it all. And the blog too, perhaps? But in my defence, it doesn’t seem to matter what approach I take with regards to my blog – being honest about it or not – it always has a funny way of coming around and biting me in the ass.

Is reading my blog really a dumpable offence? 

I decided not. I decided that, if we were to break up, Brown Eyes would have won. And Bear and I are amazing when that fucking cock-snot isn’t popping up and fucking shit up, so I’m not going to let him. We decided to talk. I told him that things happened really quickly and I don’t think I had the chance to mourn. I told him that Brown Eyes really had meant something to me, more than I let myself realise, but he didn’t mean that to me now. I was jealous, but that doesn’t mean I want to get back with the guy. I still get jealous about the fact my boyfriend from when I was 14 years old is married with a kid now. I’m a crazy girl. I haven’t been a crazy girl for a while, but I am still a secret crazy girl.

After all was said and done, we’re good. He misread my blog post and I overreacted. (Surely not.) I’ve been so determined I can keep my blog a secret for all these years, and all I’ve ever done is fail at it. Maybe I should take some of my own advice – stop being so paranoid? So I told him that I would probably change my mind every five minutes, flitting between “Don’t read my fucking blog” and “Here, read this”, and that I would try to get used to having a boyfriend + a blog in the same world … Although he says he never, ever wants to read it again because he’s done enough damage.

Bear, meet Mollie. Mollie, meet Bear. 

I’m trying to think of it as a blog experiment. What d’ya think?

*Mollie is my alter-ego. It’s the faux-name I use when I have to put a name in to sign-up for something through my blog. It’s become my name for the blog in “my world”. Also: Bestie’s name for me when I act like a right “Mollie” – AKA the early-twenties version of myself. “Well, that was a Mollie move.” 

Featured image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay