I’ve always said I wouldn’t blog about personal things but this is my blog so I can break my own rules when I think it’s the right thing to do. I see this blog as a tool, and right now I need a tool to save me having to repeatedly re-tell something that it will hurt me a lot to have to keep repeating. Myself and my partner of over three years have parted ways. I’m pretty devastated, to put it mildly. In my mind I had been planning our life together and really thought this one was for the long haul. Now there’s a very large hole in my life that’s going to take some time to build a bridge over. Right now I’m still very numb and have lost interest in all the things I used to do and care about. I don’t feel in the humor for working on www.IrishAstronomy.org and blogging is not really something I think I’ll be in the humor for for a while. I’m working on a lot of posts at the moment but I just don’t see myself having the energy to finish them just now. Somehow, not having someone to share my daily life and minor triumphs with makes everything seem rather pointless. I’m also going to have a lot of very unpleasant and difficult practical tasks to do to un-tangle our very inter-twined lives, joint bank accounts to close, a room with our stuff to separate, both of us being total nerds, a joint server to separate out and that kind of thing. I think that will be enough to keep me ‘entertained’ for a while anyhow, after that’s all done I’ll probably be able to start getting back to a normal life and settling in to being single again.

I’m not going into details, that’s personal, but there are some things I do want to say. Firstly, no one did anything bad or terrible to cause this breakup. Those of you who know us will know that although we really do love each other we were very much the odd-couple, we were cheese and chalk and against all odds and most expectations we managed to adapt and compromise and have a very good relationship. However, no matter how much you love each other, some differences just aren’t overcomeable. There are some things where no compromise exists, where there is no middle way, to be nerdy about it, they are boolean things. Do or don’t, can or can’t things. We hit a few of those, some very personal and hence not for public discussion, others more normal I guess, like me not seeing myself as a Dad, and my total incompatibility with city life and a love of country living on one side coupled with an inverse incompatibility with country life and a love of city life on the other. Basically, despite the fact that we both really love each other, we’ve hit the reality that there is no possible long term future in which one of us isn’t miserable and the other won’t hate themselves for causing it. The kind of people we are we can’t continue in a relationship that we know can’t work so this is a clean break. The idea is for it to be as quick and clean as possible.

I’m very lucky to have some really good friends who were over within literally half an hour of being told with Belgian Beer, good wine, and later, ice-cream in hand. That was very much appreciated, thanks!

This post has turned out longer than I’d planned. I had planned on this being a short, here’s the facts sort of post, but it just flowed so I went with it. I’m not re-reading or revising or editing it. Most of the posts you get to see here are the result of many re-drafts and major edits. This one isn’t, it’s a raw, first-draft post, so forgive any bad spelling, bad punctuation, bad grammar or rubbish phraseology it almost certainly contains.