In which drama arrives in this LJ

This entry is for the many people who I’m sure are pop­ping by from green­glow­grrl’s journal to see what the Devil looks like.

Let’s start from the top. She never asked dir­ectly me to remove her from my friends list nor asked me not to read her journal. I only read that in her journal claim­ing I’d already done it. 

[EDIT Seems she did ask me, by SMS from an SMS web site and so I mis­in­ter­preted the slightly oblique word­ing as some form of sms spam… eep. Sorry, Chakae, didn’t mean to mis­lead anyone and as I’ve noted, I have indeed now unfriended as requested.]

I’ve now unfriended her, but, as most of you will know, that does­n’t magic­ally make it impossible for me to go dir­ectly to her journal and read what’s there if she makes public, non-flocked posts.

Since she’s made some quite vit­ri­olic unlocked posts, I’m respond­ing in an unlocked post too.

First of all, I have noth­ing against this woman. I’ve never met her and feel noth­ing but com­pas­sion for her. Please don’t start assum­ing you know any­thing about this situ­ation. Secondly, Doug has loved her, still loves her, and is quite dis­traught about the pain she is feel­ing over all this.

When Doug was here the first time, he was at a strange point in his life. From what I can gather, just about every woman who met him fell in love with him and instantly wanted to have chil­dren with him. His loving beha­viour and – I would argue – naïveté meant his actions were mis­in­ter­preted for rein­force­ment far too often. She is not the only person hurt like this, to his sad­ness and chagrin.

He and I met during this time too, but it was dif­fer­ent. We both decided to tell cer­tain people things in person. We haven’t told most people we know how ser­i­ous we are about each other. Doug thought he and Chakae were just intim­ate friends and didn’t real­ise how deeply she felt about him. In ret­ro­spect, that has caused some ser­i­ous hurt. If we had the time over, we would do things differently.

Before every­one starts rant­ing about how they are going to drag Doug’s name through the mud through­out the SF Bay and else­where, I think it’s fair to note that he kept his prom­ise to go to Bris­bane first and share his birth­day with her. He forgot about her men­tion­ing Wood­ford – but it’s a folk fest­ival. There’s noth­ing to say we could­n’t have all gone together. We could have camped together and become friends. Is it evil of him to have for­got­ten some­thing sug­ges­ted to him 9 months ago? If it’s never been men­tioned again, that could make it hard.

And I note a couple of friends of mine have taken ‘sides’, one on Chakae’s side, another on mine. Please don’t. It does­n’t help anyone.

I am so sorry that you’ve been hurt, Chakae. I am so sorry that the two of you didnt com­mu­nic­ate more clearly. But I feel that I know what I need to know and I don’t feel I need to be warned off Doug.

And we now return you to our usual, drama-free programming.

PS: Mum, it’s okay. But thanks for the wor­ried call. I’ll call you shortly.