Dear Jay Jay:

You had a plan: to take it easy with this man, to not rush, to spend quality time with him and ease into a relationship with him. That plan was thwarted by your ex-best-friend move on him. She is now in a relationship with him, and you are not. Understandably, that angers you.

The betrayal aspect here is, I believe, is the ex-best-friend betrayal of you. The not-boyfriend-yet, as I see it, did not betray you because you were not yet in a relationship yet when she made the move on him.

Since she betrayed you, she was no longer interested in communicating with you and neither did she want him to communicate with you, and he accommodated her.

This relationship is working for the two of them, so far. It may work for a long time, maybe for the rest of their lives. There is a fit there. Maybe he needed a woman who clearly expressed her need for him to rescue her. That was the fit for him. Spending time with you was nice for him, but his … excitement, motivation for a relationship was turned on by the role he feels comfortable with: the rescuer.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for you to overcome was your ex-best-friend deceit- deceiving her now boyfriend and using your friendship so to benefit herself, at your expense. The unfairness of it, is that what distresses you so?

anita