I'm not fine; I'm hardly okay.

I've tried to talk myself up in all this to convince myself that I'm okay; that God and I are cool, and that everything is fine.

The truth is, I'm a wreck. I'm not happy. It's not that I'm not happy with him, because I am. He makes me happier than any guy I've ever been with. But I'm not happy when it comes to the physical portion.

I feel sick whenever we fool around, and the thought of having sex has gone past being something of excitement, and to a point where it's actually a complete turn-off.

I don't know how to explain all this to him. I don't even know how to explain it myself.

I feel like I'm falling apart.

An online friend e-mailed me recently about my posts. We've discussed back and forth a little bit what I've been suggesting through them, and I told her I wanted her to be completely honest with me. And she was. Honest enough that I got a virtual slap in the face hard enough that it actually forced me to stop ignoring my gut.

The truth is... I've been struggling for a while. Even between these posts and the attempt at humour with the whole thing. I figured if I just kept convincing myself that I want it this way and that I'm happy, I would believe it.

My friend wrote:" I do, however, deeply believe that there's no place for mediocre Christianity.  Yeah, there're always going to be mistakes.  I'd be the biggest hypocrite to pretend I don't make them every single day.  But they're mistakes.  God asks us to strive to follow him in every step.  That's what concerned me so much about your writing.  If you're not going to choose to try follow Christ's teaching, why bother pretending to be a Christian in the first place?"

And that's where the tonne of bricks came in. Isn't that the very message that I have strived to follow? Isn't that the very reason I rant and rave about the way so many in the church behave? Yet there I am, stumbling into the same category as the people who drive me up the wall.

I'm scared. I'm scared to sit down and tell the boyfriend that I can't do the sex thing anymore. I'm scared because I know he's not going to understand. He's not going to be able to understand the whole striving for purity and serving God through it. And what's worse is that I chose to start having sex with him, and now for him, I'm cutting him off completely.

How did I get this far so fast? How did I get so quickly knocked off course?

Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows... I just really can't believe that.

Relationships scare the living shit out of me. Seriously.

I'm afraid to let myself believe that this is really happening. People talk about that fuzzy rainbows and butterfly phase as being something normal to every relationship. I haven't felt that since... well, since I got my heart ripped out, shredded into pieces and handed back to me nearly four years ago.

It's because of sunshine and rainbows that I stopped dating. From what I've seen, they're dangerous.

But this isn't so much about the danger of them, as it is an admittance of fear based around the fact that I now find myself incapable of feeling them even a little bit. I'm realizing it's possible that in my quest to stop myself from getting my heart stomped on because of my fairytale idea of romance that I perhaps went too far, numbing myself to being able to really feel at all.

I know I am definitely in like with my boyfriend. But I find myself shutting my emotions off before I even realize it. I wait for and prepare for the worst. Dwelling on the 'if we're together then' to keep my thoughts and emotions in check.

And perhaps, I read too much into his actions or lack-thereof in a way to feed into my defence mechanism of preparing for the worst.

The truth is, I'm scared of letting him in. I'm scared of trusting him, and falling for him, and letting him have the part that is most precious to me. I always had this idea that I would give away my heart, my whole being, before I gave away my body. That my body would be the hardest part to give away. But it wasn't. Giving that away came with ease. There are times where I really don't even feel anything when I give him myself, and I'm terrified for him to know that.

I don't know if any of this is normal. If it's normal to be cautious about one's feelings and one's heart... or at least to exercise caution to this extreme. Or if it's normal to count on his feelings for you changing so that you can't be burnt when they do.

I feel like some teeny-bopper just entering the world of dating, so unsure of everything. And in a way, I probably am like that. This is all new to me. I don't even know how a proper relationship is supposed to function. But I guess that's part of the journey. Learning from the mistakes and taking things as they go.