The path trodden alone.

The single life can be heart-wrendingly lonely at times, no matter how much you enjoy your own company and relish your independently spent nights of solitude reading books and drinking red wine. To tread day after day through birthdays, festive events, parties, nights out, dinners etc as a solo party has the potential to become dispiriting and can end up leaving you with a dull ache, the sense of something not actually missing but just not present.

I like being a single entity, just me against the world, able to make all decisions irrelevant to the whims and desires of others. But every so often I so spend time, oh usually nothing more than a few days, but typically only an evening, feeling horribly and inescapably lonely. This evening I had drinks with a friend who has newly moved in with her boyfriend and while I might have expected to feel a trace of jealousy mixed in with my joy for her, it was not that that left me feeling alone. Rather it was the way in which her whole life seems to have changed, and I suppose the sub-conscious fear within me that I won't fit into it any more. They have started to socialise a great deal with other couples: dinner parties, nights out and so on, as well of course as lots of time just the two of them, and their lives now look so very complete and filled up with things. I guess I feel a little pushed out. Or perhaps it is simply the fact that every time I now see her she seems to talk endlessly about her boyfriend, their new flat and in intricate detail about their new life together. It is lovely to see her so happy, I just wish she could do rather a lot more of the looking happy and a great deal less of the talking about it, I do think it a tad insensitive for her to have gone on about it so very much.

Lancelot has a girlfriend... this was of course inevitable but I liked him so very much that I am sad about it. He is the only chap I have fancied so rotten in a long time and we had such chemistry together and got along so well... Yes he is a bastard, yes he probably would have cheated on me (no I won't let him cheat on this girl with me), and yes he would have left me broken hearted. But morosely I imagine I would prefer to at least feel something for a boy even if it does end in heart break. These boys I date, they tend to me very nice and all but I never feel anything very much for any of them, certainly not after the initial excitement has worn off. I long to fall hopelessly, overwhelmingly in love again.

I think 2012 will be the year of my second great love. Oh how wonderful to this time next year have, or perhaps have had, a splendid love affair.