Who told her?

Recap: The running theme of this blog is that I’m a Perfectly Normal Woman with credentials. The point of this blog is to allow me to wallow in worry and nurse my neuroses about my relationship as if the bras hadn’t even smouldered a bit.

And all this without shame. Or, at least, with only anonymous shame and my real-world image of myself as an intelligent self-sufficient modern-type firmly in tact, in both my eyes and those of The Others...

So, imagine my surprise when it turned out that my terrible secret isn’t a secret at all. How dreadful it felt to see my veneer slip before my very own eyes, and my naked self lain out for disapproval.

“Honestly?” Said the woman who bore my boyfriend, then tricked me into admitting that I didn’t like her art, as my boyfriend and I foolishly encouraged her to say exactly what she thought of me, The Girlfriend.

“Yes, honestly.” What the fuck were we thinking?

“I think that beneath your confident veneer of a Perfectly Normal Woman you are an Insecure Little Girl.”

I’m pretty sure that isn’t good. My boyfriend jumped to my defence, and I to hers. My feeble insistence that I understood and even appreciated her reasoning didn’t bode well for my planned dissection of her statement as soon as I got home. All I missed out was an accompanying cry, “Love me! Validate me! Mummy!”

So, today I took crucial time out from my facebook-stalking habit (I have no idea what my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend was doing today and I feel strangely detached from my own, slightly odd, reality) in order to dwell on possible not-very-well hidden meanings.

I’ve managed to come up with several possible explanations.

1. She hates me.
2. She hates me because she thinks I’m putting on a show but that actually I’m quite pathetic and immature (an analysis, I must admit, shared by ex-boyfriends, but the scorned can’t be trusted).
3. I am pathetic and immature and (worse still) my ex-boyfriends were right.
4. She doesn’t hate me, but she feels sorry for me and my inner little girl. We’ll probably have to have family counselling together.
5. It was a compliment. My vulnerability is endearing and who doesn’t like little girls? All things nice and all that…

Number five, even to me, looks slightly unhinged from the real world.

My boyfriend insists that she simply meant that she’d like to give me a hug. Apparently she has a strong spiritual connection with my id or something.

Self-loathing level: High.