Latte With Confusion and Over-Analysis

A story I would have told had I been updating my diary at the time it happened (it all happened about 8 weeks ago): Mare and I are both members of the local online lesbian site. I’d been having this most excellent email exchange with a girl from this town over the lesbian-net. Crazy long weird emails. Then Mare turns around and announces that she’d invited a couple of girls from the les-net to our weekly young dykes group gathering. Yeah, with Ingrid, the woman I’d been messaging, included. Well, we’d been emailing for less than a week, only a handful of messages, really (but some good quality emails, I gotta say) and I’d been kinda leading up to suggesting that getting a coffee might be a good thing. Meeting up with a large bunch of other lesbians maybe not ideal situation, but since it was happening I couldn’t do much about it.

So, we’re at the poolhall on Friday night, just messing about as we do. And in walks this amazingly stunning woman. I mean, we all stopped and looked at her, impolite as that was. I could feel everyone around me stand up a little straighter and smooth their hair. Yes, this was Ingrid. I thought (standing amongst a sea of single young lesbians), “all bets are off, here! I’ve exchanged a couple of emails with this girl, but everyone here is keen on her. She can take her pick”. She came and stood next to me, and we smiled shyly and had that sweet shy flirtatious type of conversation all night. I could feel the other dykes squinting their daggered eyes at me. Stunning, she was. Not only stunning, but very intelligent and completely quirky and weird. We concluded that the best way to do the garden was topless with Aimee Mann playing. We drank beer. We smiled an awful lot. And I was pretty happy.

BUT. Of course there’s a but! It’s my life we’re talking about here! I wrote an email the next day saying, blah blah good to meet you blah blah great conversation blah blah it might be good to go get coffee without the entire lesbian population of the region tagging along someday. And she wrote back, “sorry, but I have to go disappear for a little while”. Turns out that she’s only *just* coming out, she’s had one week-long “relationship” with a woman who then turned around and decided that she was straight, and Ingrid felt very fragile, vulnerable and overwhelmed by the whole thing. Fair enough, I thought. Coming out is always a bit scary and if she needs her space, there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. And Ingrid disappeared.

About two weeks ago, she writes to me again, saying she’s come out of hiding and asking for my phone number. Frankly, I was surprised to hear from her, but I sent my number to her, and subsequently heard NOTHING from her. Till tonight.

Tonight, she writes to me again, saying: “Sorry, you must be getting pissed off with me not writing or calling… Got so much stress at Tech at the moment… Anyway….we should maybe go for coffee some time?” Oh lordy!

Part of me really fancies her, and then a big part of me thinks, “wow. flighty. if she takes this long to reply to an email, I really don’t think she can cope with a relationship”

Then there is Athena, who admittedly I’m not even close to going out with. We are barely at the little-flirting stage. But I do like her a lot, and I’d kinda like to be with her… if we can ever get ourselves together! ‘Sephone said this the other day: “you both obviously like each other, you’re both just too stupidly shy to do anything about it!” I don’t know how accurate she is, but, yeah.

The thing is this: I think I’d prefer to be with Athena, because she knows she’s gay and has her feet a little more firmly on the ground. Plus, she’s a foxy redhaired artist, how much more perfect can she be? But I don’t *know* that she’s actually keen on anything happening, and if she wasn’t keen on anything happening then I would quite like to maybe go out with Ingrid. But I can’t say to Ingrid, can we postpone coffee till I figure out whether this other girl likes me?

And yes, I can hear everyone yelling at me now! It’s just coffee! But I think Ingrid possibly really likes me, and I think her asking me to go have coffee is possibly a big, big step for her, with all her newly gayness and everything. So if I went and had coffee with her, and she was all flirting smily and wanting other things, and then something happened with Athena and I turned around and said to Ingrid, “oh, sorry, you were kinda my back-up and now I don’t need you anymore”, then she’s just gonna go running and hiding again.

Do I over-analyse things? Is there a cure for that?