Because I Can’t Write a Novel – Day Three

This post has been sat on my desktop for months. I decided to finally finish it and use it in the spirit of ‘Because I Can’t Write a Novel’

It’s one of those age-old questions, isn’t it? Would you tell someone if you knew something that you thought they needed to know? For example, would you tell your female friend if you knew their husband / boyfriend was cheating on them? Would you tell your male friend if you knew their girlfriend was cheating on them? What if you knew that the guy a girl was crushing hard for was a con-man, a liar, a serial womaniser, and more than likely in trouble with the cops? What if you didn’t even know the girl? What if you did?

Girl-code … we hear a lot about that these days, don’t we? I hear it a lot on TOWIE because none of the girls on there seem to follow it. Yes, I watch TOWIE. And what? But what is it, girl-code I mean? And how far does it go? And what if your friends – the people you should follow the code for – aren’t girls at all? What happens when they’re boys? Where does your loyalty stand then?

I struggle with girl-code, sisterhood, whatever you want to call it. I’ve always had a predominantly male friend-circle, and I find women quite bitchy / more difficult to get along with. Not all of them obviously, I’ve made some bloody wonderful female friends, but more women have the potential to make me cry than men, and I would value a female opinion over a male opinion any day of the week. I just don’t know where my loyalties are supposed to lie.

I started writing this blog a while ago. I found myself in a position where I thought a guy I had been talking to was maybe also talking to a bunch of other women too. He was super-flirty with me, that Twitter-guy, and I’ll admit I flirted a little in response. “Dry-flirting”, I like to call it. It’s just flirty chit-chat. The more we talked, the more I would have classed this man as a friend, but I also found myself in a place where I was developing a crush. He’d sent me a couple of snaps of himself, and I’d sent a couple of me in return. I thought we were becoming friends IRL, and that’s not something that comes easy to me. With The Dom as my only other blog to IRL experience, I don’t think I can be blamed for being a tad dubious. Right?

It wasn’t long before I found the conversation taking a new level of flirting. Flirting that probably wasn’t just flirty chit-chat. Well, it wasn’t for me anyway. By this point I’d developed a definite crush, so I figured I ought to check myself. Things were starting to get serious with Bear, so I made sure I Bear-dropped into our conversations, and things with the Twitter Guy seem to back off a little. Our chats were still flirty-ish, but not at the level that they were at before. More friendly-flirting – he had started telling me about women he’d been talking to, and various updates with his kids, life, etc.

It wasn’t long before he was sending me screenshots of conversations he was having with other women. The “crazy girl” for example, who’d started “hitting on him” on Twitter out of the blue. Plus another hot nurse, and this cute PR girl … It soon became apparent to me, not only through our chit-chats but also the way he was talking to other Twitter ladies publicly, that he was playing a game. He was lapping up the attention and, for a spell, I felt very foolish in developing my crush. I was just another girl he was talking to, to help boost his ego.

Before long a few of the other female bloggers started to come forward – this Twitter guy had been spinning most of the ladies he was talking to exactly the same lines. Things like how special they were, how beautiful, how he wanted them to progress into a relationship … We’d never gotten to that point, but that didn’t stop me feeling a little … disposable? Hurt? A bit betrayed? My crush aside, this was a man who I had started to class as my friend, and he’d been saying the same things to other women that he’d been saying to me. Except it was joking to me, wasn’t it? I was the friend you had the “flirty banter” with. I always am. At this point, I slowly started sliding out of his DMs, mostly because I didn’t really understand the boundaries of our friendship. Also because Bear probably wouldn’t have been impressed if he’d seen some of our earlier chit-chats.

It soon came out that this guy was in a whole load of trouble, more serious trouble than it was worth any of the bloggers he’d been wooing getting involved with, and the truth was finally revealed. He’d been trying his luck with any lady on Twitter who’d dared to flirt with him, and he was also (seemingly) a con-man in real life too.

This is what posed the problem. He’d told me about a few women he’d been talking to, and judging from the screenshots he’d sent me at the time, these women were quite literally throwing themselves at him. All of a sudden I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I wanted to warn these women about the man they were getting involved with, but at the same time it didn’t really have anything to do with me. If I were to get involved, I’d be shit-stirring, or trying to add more fuel to the fire. But if I didn’t and one of those girls were to be screwed over by him, I’d feel like a bag of shit. And before you say I’m being overly dramatic, we’re talking screwed out of thousands of pounds as well as a serious amount of heartache. A serious con-man, not just some crappy womaniser.

In the end I told the other girls involved, simply because I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if something had happened and I’d done nothing to stop it. But to get there, I had to ask the advice of other females. I wasn’t sure where that line was. I wasn’t sure whether I should open my mouth, or keep my knowledge to myself. And I’d started to seriously stalk at this point, finding more and more information about this charming man who ended up being a total crook.

I never know what to do in situations like this. Whether I know the girl or not, if I know something bad isn’t it my duty to “save” them? Or at least give them the vital information they’re missing? Isn’t that what the spirit of “sisterhood” is all about?

I don’t have very many female friends, so I’m not really sure how I would react if I were to find something out about one of their fellas. Bestie’s male BFF has done a few things his now-wife wouldn’t be impressed with over the years, but I’ve never felt the need to get involved with any of it. I would always have classed him as a greater friend than she was. Well … up until everything kicked off and he told me I’d been leading his best friend on for 15 years, of course!

But seriously though – where is the girl-code line? When are you meant to open your mouth, and when aren’t you? What’s the difference between being a shit-stirrer, and just looking out for another girl? And which one are you? Because I really don’t know which side of the line I stand, despite my best intentions. Was I right for opening my mouth?

(For the record, she said thanks, they’d stopped talking by the time I’d gotten to her, and she wasn’t as bitchy about it as I thought she might have been!)

And, just in case you didn’t know what this whole ‘Because I Can’t Write a Novel’ business is all about, you can find the background information HERE.

• Expected word count: 5,001
• Word count today: 1271
• Word count to date: 3,459 (Only a tad behind already … )