While blogging, like all journaling, can be an ideal place for meditation, self-contemplation and intuition, it can only be so when the space is set for you to do with solely as you wish.

— Philo

Thus inspired, I write these words. Because I need to.

You know —

For a couple of weeks there, I was over it. It seemed like it was past. But for some reason I’ve been thinking about it a lot again these last few days.

Here’s the abbreviated version. I’ll spare you the 10,000-word version I’ve written, which is complete with excerpts from e-mails and instant message conversations. (I process my emotions through writing.)

I fell in love this past spring. I don’t know if I would have used those words at the time, but that’s what it was. We met in April. And the thing is, I never fall in love. But he had so much of what I look for. It can be strange to be on the receiving end of such love, I imagine. “Why does this person feel this way about me?” I don’t know why. I just did. He was handsome, dark-haired, Jewish, intelligent, funny, charming, and cute. He was practically my ideal.

He was also emotionally manipulative.

And so good at it.

And he was focused almost exclusively on his own needs.

The needs of others didn’t matter. He did things without thinking about how they’d affect other people. It was always about what he needed and wanted and nothing more. And he kept changing his mind about what exactly that was.

After I met him, we went back and forth for months. He didn’t want to date me, then he did, then he didn’t, then he did, then he didn’t then he did then he didn’t then he did and on and on and on and on and on…

It was a big circle. I’d express feelings for him. Then he’d run away from those feelings and say he just wanted to be friends. Which I couldn’t do. So I’d decide it wasn’t worth it. But he wasn’t comfortable with me not having feelings for him, so he’d draw me back in with cute conversation and promises that it would be different next time. And I’d come back. And then he’d push me away again and I’d leave and then he’d pull me back in again. Over and over and over.

I fell for it — every time. Because I was so damn in love with him.

He told me that I was adorable. He told me that I was wonderful. He told me that I was the only person in his life who’d ever made an effort to understand him, and that he truly valued me for that.

The thing is, we never got to do anything more than kiss and hold each other. He never invited me home with him. Never. (He didn’t even kiss me until we’d known each other a month.)

The last straw finally came in July and August. He went to Florida for a five-day vacation to visit a friend and the friend’s boyfriend. The day before he left, I asked if he wanted to go out for a drink that night. He said he was tired and was just going to go home and crash. Okay.

When he came back from Florida, he was a different person. He didn’t even call me for two days — and then I finally called him. When I called, he told me at first that he didn’t want to talk about it. Then he told me he wanted to be single. He’d had sex with his hosts. He’d apparently gotten lots of attention. He didn’t want to date me. Or anyone.

Fine. I was unhappy, but what could I do.

Two days later he called me again. He’d changed his mind. He wanted to give it a shot after all. I responded that I couldn’t deal with this anymore and that I needed space. He was starting to cry.

About a week later, we made up, and things were promising again. I was happy.

But over the next couple of weeks, the vacillations happened faster and faster, like a spinning top about to fall over. His feelings for me changed almost daily. Finally, I decided, screw it. I went out on a date with someone else and went home with the guy.

After reading that blog entry, the guy I was in love with (I’ll call him D) e-mailed me and told me he wasn’t comfortable that I’d gone out with someone else. I asked him why.

“Because I love you, Jeff,” he wrote.

I was stunned.

So I called him and we had a long talk. It was honest and beautiful. We decided we’d go out on a real date the following Saturday, and we’d take it slowly. But he asked if I planned to see the other guy again. I said I didn’t know. He said, in a really cute voice, that he didn’t like having competition. I was happy — this was a good sign.

A few days later was Thursday — the big blackout. D and I were supposed to hang out on Saturday. But on Friday, the day after the blackout, I was home from work, and I got an e-mail from a friend of mine, S.

My friend S told me that he and D had been seeing each other for the past three weeks.

He’d been pestering D to tell me, but since D wouldn’t tell me, he’d decided to tell me himself.

As I sat at my computer, staring at S’s words on the screen, I felt weak. My legs turned to jelly. My heart sank.

The thing is — I had sort of suspected this. See, D and S had met on gay.com a few weeks earlier and had chatted. I knew this because I’d been talking to D about my friend S one day, and after I described S, D had told me that he realized he’d actually chatted online with S the night before.

That wasn’t the only reason I’d suspected it. In various online chats over the last few weeks, S had asked me several times how things were going between me and D. He’d seemed almost unnaturally interested in D. Even before that — back in May — S had once e-mailed me and asked me about D, out of the blue. When I’d responded coyly, he’d persisted.

I’d figured I was just being paranoid, but apparently not.

Of course they couldn’t just chat online. No — of course my worst dreams had to come true. Of course they had to wind up dating.

After I got S’s email, S and I talked on the phone. I asked him questions.

It turned out that their first date was the night before D had left for Florida — the very night that I’d asked D out and D had said he was tired and needed to crash. And the night after their first date, in fact, I was hanging out with S at a party, and S had said nothing to me about D. I’d even asked S around that time if he’d chatted with D online, and he’d said no. Even though he knew that he had, because he’d seen D’s photo before.

Now, on the phone with S, stunned, I asked S if he and D had done anything sexual. They had.

“More than kissing?” I asked.

“Yes.”

My heart sank again.

D had never had sex with me over the previous three and a half months that I’d known him, but he’d had sex with S within three weeks of meeting him.

I asked S what he knew about the most recent status of me and D. He said that D had told him that he and I were just going to be friends now. I filled S in on the news: D had told me he loved me and didn’t want me to date other people. S was surprised to hear this.

I asked if he was going to tell D that he’d informed me of what was going on. He said he was.

That night, I called D to discuss plans for meeting up the next day, but I didn’t let on that I knew. I wanted to wait to discuss it in person. We had a nice, casual conversation. But a few minutes later, he called me back and left a voicemail saying that I was giving him attitude and that it didn’t seem like I was ever going to be satisfied with just friendship, and that he didn’t want to see me the next day and he didn’t want to talk about it.

So I called him back and left him a message, saying that I knew about him and S, pointing out D’s hypocrisy, and telling him that I was going to be damned if I was going to let myself be blamed for not being able to predict how D was going to feel about me on any given day.

D finally called me a few days later. I let him have it. He wisely said very little. I said it was completely over. I told him to go date S.

As it turned out, it didn’t last between them. Within days, D and S went from good terms to bad.

A few days later, D instant-messaged me, asking if this was really how I wanted to leave things. I said yes. He tried to explain, but by that point I didn’t care anymore. I said it was finished. The last thing he said was that he admired me for my strength.

That was more than a month ago. We haven’t communicated since.

My feelings about all of this have been complicated.

I haven’t known whom to be angrier at.

That I was angry at D goes without saying. After months of conversations, he knew exactly how I felt about him. In fact, he’d even finally told me that he loved me and that he didn’t want me to date other people. Meanwhile, he was dating and sleeping with my friend behind my back.

How did he think I’d feel about this? Either he didn’t care how I’d feel, or he deliberately set out to hurt me. Either way, it sucks.

He took advantage of my goodwill and my patience, time after time. He figured he could do anything he wanted, because he could always sweet-talk me and convince me to come back. And why wouldn’t he think that? It was true. I kept falling for it. I kept being stupid and in love.

So of course I was angry at D. Duh.

But I was also angry at my friend S, who at one point this summer was a potential roommate. S deliberately lied to me. And he kept asking me how things were going between me and D, when he was already dating D himself.

The amazing thing is, S had already known all about what D had done to me over the last few months. At one point — something I haven’t mentioned yet — at one point in June, it turned out that D had been dating one of S’s friends in addition to me. In fact, S was with me when I found this out. He even listened to me describe the drama of me and D. And yet, knowing all of this about D, he fell for D just as I did, and he dated him behind my back.

S claimed that when he and D had chatted online, he’d known who D was but he didn’t say anything to D about it because he was curious to see how it would pan out. But then he found himself falling for D. This is baloney, because S had clearly already been interested in D for a long time. He must have been thrilled to chat with D.

In general, although it’s true that S was the one who finally told me what was going on, I found his behavior in this whole thing to be opportunistic and, more than that, tacky.

Here’s something else that floors me. Since all of this happened, S has removed me from his Friendster list and his blogroll and he hasn’t contacted me. As if it were somehow my fault that he got hurt. But if S got hurt in all of this, it’s his own fault. He should have known better.

Then again, by that point, I should have known better, too.

You know one of the most humiliating things about all this? I’d been blogging about how things had gone badly between me and D, and that whole time, S had been reading those entries — presumably with great happiness. And I didn’t even know.

From D’s online profile, I know that he’s now “seeing someone special.” I happen to know it’s not S, but for all I know, the “someone special” is reading this. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the “someone special” is someone I know. It would be par for the course.

Too bad D never considered me to be someone special.

Also, while I never got to sleep with D, there’s another way of putting it: D never got to sleep with me, either.

My feelings for D are so complicated. We haven’t talked in weeks, but stupidly, stupidly, I’m still in love with him. Rather, I’m in love with the qualities I admired in him from the start. But I hate that other side of him — the manipulation, the inconsistency, the streaks of meanness, the inability to deal with emotions in anything but a good child/bad child paradigm, the games that nobody should have to put up with. The thing is, D thought he was so desirable that anyone would gladly put up with this. But nobody deserves to put up with this, unless they do it with full knowledge of what they’re getting into.

I know D’s not evil. It’s just that he has major, major shit to work on. And you can’t solve your issues if you bury them.

In my fantasy world —

But no. This is the real world.

I’ll be over this eventually. I may have scars, but I’ll move on.

If I’ve hurt anyone in writing this, I apologize.

It was just something I needed to do.
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