Ok, this one really is written stream-of-consciousness-style, I guess

For all our good will, my girlfriend and I still struggle with my AB side. She admittedly flips between genuine curiosity about it and a tendency to find it a bit too freakish for her. And I struggle with trying to communicate exactly what it is AB means to me, which is something that I feel that, if I could do well, things would go a whole lot more smoothly for both myself and for her, as I'd be more easily able to communicate exactly what it is I want out of my AB side and why I want it.

There are loads of theories as to what exactly 'makes one' an AB. As a teen (or 'TB', I suppose, to use the community jargon), I was obsessed with trying to understand the psychological underpinnings behind kinks, quirks and fetishes. I wanted to find out what had made me this way, what had made me 'abnormal'. Nowadays my passion for psychology has faded, and I tend to think that any over-analysis of potential reasons behind kinks ends up sounding too much like that 'finding your root' scene in the queer satire But I'm a Cheerleader, wherein a bunch of gay boys and girls try to find a specific moment in their past that took them off the beaten path and into the wild woods of perversity. Basically, it sounds kind of ludicrous and also tends to pathologise 'abnormal' sexualities, by positing them as something which must have been caused by some sort of straying from the 'norm'. "If x event hadn't happened, I would have turned out normal."

Ok, yeah, AB stuff is pretty 'abnormal,' in the strictest sense, I'll be honest. But it sure isn't crazy.

One theory that my girlfriend raised is that it's to do with neediness, about having a space or a persona wherein you feel it's ok to be needy and ask to have all your needs met by others. I don't know. For all I know there are as many reasons one becomes an AB as there are ABies, but it's certainly something I've been thinking about since she brought it up.

Anyway, I haven't achieved any sort of conclusion as yet, so sorry for the confused/confusing post, I guess, but really, I just wanted to check into this blog before this weekend.

"What happens this weekend?" you ask...

Well, this Sunday I'm actually attending my first ever ageplay munch: a get-together for a bunch of ageplayers where we'll actually have a pleasant sit and a talk. Well, that was the theory, anyway. A recent look at this Sunday's weather means we may have to make a last-minute change from the outdoor picnic that we had been planning, but still, the show will go on somewhere and somehow.

I'll admit, I'm actually feeling a lot of apprehension about this whole thing. I mean, I've met ABies, DLs and even 'parent' types in reality before, but never have I met a whole group at once and I've certainly never met any while with a partner, either. If I'm going to hang everything out there and expose my feelings completely, I'll be honest: I'm a little worried about how my partner's going to take all this. Fuck it, I'm really worried about how I'm going to take all this. In my most outlandish fears, I keep guessing that all the people that I'm going to meet will be utter crazies and will put my girlfriend off completely. Even worse, what if they're completely sane about the whole thing and it turns out that I'm the crazy one, with all my neuroses and nonsense? *sigh* At the heart of all this is of course my fear that I'm going to drive away my girlfriend with this weird fetish of mine. For all my supposed pride about it, I do realise how strange it seems to have this fetish and how odd it can seem to other people. I have a girlfriend who has played with furries, ponygirls and even done some pretty risqué taboo-play, but this has the potential to freak her out. Put in blunt black-and-white terms, this weekend will either make her see how normal AB stuff is and give her some sort of positive epiphany or alternatively she'll be completely thrown by a group of nappy-wearing weirdos. The likely result is somewhere in the middle, but that doesn't really have the same sort of rhetorical weight to it.

I'm worried. I'm hella worried, and it pains me to even admit that. Still, my girlfriend is a real trooper. Hell, she even arranged this munch. As I've said before, she really is going above and beyond to try and understand all of this. But yeah, I'll guess we'll see how it goes...