Dear Timepassages2070:

I will be spending a few hours re-telling your story, combining what you shared in your three posts, and my suggestions and interpretations (with evidence to these in the form of quotes).

You described “a platonic friendship”  with “an excruciatingly beautiful woman” (I will refer to this woman as B) for the past twenty  years. You are married and she is married to other people. For most of these 20 years it was a  “good, but casual” friendship where the two of you got together a few times a year for coffee.

A few years ago, B, an excruciatingly beautiful woman,  informed you that she decided to ask her husband for a divorce and that they have been living as roommates for a couple of years.

A year and a half ago, you and B, an excruciatingly beautiful woman,  “became a lot closer”. You became her confidante and she became yours. You shared with her that your marriage too that has been “in a decline for a long time”.

For over a year, the two of you “were getting together more frequently”, getting together several times during the summer in spite of Coronavirus raging, and  “literally never went more than a week without talking, or texting”. For a couple of months, it was a “pretty heavy contact with each other”, and you felt that the two of you “were starting to get even closer”.

But the communication between the two  of you “has always been an issue.. there were ‘mixed signals’ from both sides”. On your side: your wife cracked down on the closer friendship more and more, making it difficult for you to be as responsive to B as you wanted to be (“I do also have to be honest in that the more my wife cracked down the more difficult it did become for me to be as responsive as I wanted to be to her so I am sure that confused her as well”).

When your wife saw B sitting on your lap one time, during a theatre improv exercise, your wife was “really set.. on the ‘war path'”. You were angry at B for making it “much more difficult for us to hang out”.

On B’s side: “there was this constant pattern of hot-cold/ push-pull… one week she was sending me full paragraph text messages, responding immediately and the next week she would become what I would call ‘half-ass aloof'”. Sometimes “she wouldn’t respond for several days or she would act like I was the one who reached out to her”.

At one point, around last summer, “things were getting a lot more consistent with communication and seeing each other”, but then something changed again: “it felt like she was starting to distance” herself from you, “It was nothing major”.

You emailed her, asking her: is everything okay? You expected her to tell you about her business, kids, but “that’s not what I got”, you wrote- angry that she didn’t answer your question the way you expected her to answer it. Instead of sharing about her life (that which you expected), she told you that “she was tired of chasing friends around and people not being responsive to her texts. She mentioned there was someone in particular that she was really unhappy with but didn’t want to get into it”, and that “she needed space from everyone”, not indicating that you are not one of the “everyone”.

“It felt like she just wanted to push us back to being super casual friends like we had been before and she thought I wouldn’t notice”, you wrote angrily, suggesting she was trying to trick you back into a casual friendship.

“Keep in mind this was a woman who literally could not go more than a few days without texting or calling me for over a year. A woman who would go on social media if I didn’t respond to a text, or voicemail, fast enough and comment on one of my posts making it clear she wanted me to reach out. A woman who had told me she had not had a friend who was as expressive, and supportive”- angry at that woman who did you wrong.

Anger continues: “but now I was in a ‘pile’ of people she needed space from- it didn’t really add up.. I just didn’t ‘buy’ what she had said in her email”- you are angry at a woman who used to want you, but no longer wants you, having dumped you in a pile of  ****, so to speak.

Angry for so long, you want her still, and you are thinking about sending her a casual text so to reconnect, but you know that if you don’t get a response, you will get angrier than you are already (“I know if I don’t get a response, I will be even more irritated”).

After she dumped you in that pile, you sent her a “freak out” message: overly-emotional, angry, desperately not wanting to lose her, and her response was that although “she had not reconciled with her husband and nothing has changed”, she “didn’t want to “tick my wife off and wanted to go back to being casual, and relaxed, friends again”.

Once again, her response was not what you expected or wanted: you did not want to be casual friends with her, you wanted closer and getting-closer relationship. So, you rejected what she told you, suggesting that she did not tell you what was really happening (“her avoiding telling me what was really up”).

More anger on your part, and she “asked for a break”, and the break is four months old at this point. You figure that she is keeping her distance from you because she is “clearly has some major intimacy issues when it comes to getting close to people.. her behavior was so all over the place”- her intimacy issues, her emotional instability issues.

You feel that what you gave her a lot, that you invested in her a lot giving her emotional support, validation, encouragement and saying nice things to her,  and you feel cheated for not getting a good return on your investment: “she liked the emotional support, validation and encouragement… she probably liked all of the nice things I said to her... she finds me attractive so getting all this attention from me probably felt nice”.

You suspect her of dishonesty, of devising a plan: “I thought her ‘plan’ may have been to try and downgrade our friendship back to it’s prior casual level and maybe at some point she would have let it drop”. But you interrupted her plan, and she broke up with you sooner than she planned: “when I picked up on something being amiss it gave her ‘permission’ to ask for a full on ‘break'”.

“she perhaps didn’t know what the heck she wanted… I truly just want her friendship back in my life.. to get her to just communicate with me like an emotionally intelligent adult.. I truly feel like she has made whatever is going on with her a much bigger deal than it needs to be because she thinks I am going  to have some crazy reaction… she is the one who really made stuff ‘weird’ the whole time… I have never felt it was that big of a deal if there were underlying feelings in a platonic friendship and that it’s just kind of a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ situation, but for some reason I think she just got too heady about it which kind of made everything get weird and come to the surface”-

– the rest of my post will be my commentary on the quote above, the last of your share:

“she.. didn’t know what the heck she wanted”- Let’s look at what you wanted from B, from one point on: you wanted a “don’t ask don’t tell” close and getting-closer relationship with her, a relationship that will appear casual to others.. and to yourselves.

You wanted a relationship where she will answer your questions the way you think she should.

When she no longer needed you- you got angry, blaming her for not being emotionally intelligent, for not behaving like an adult (“to get her to.. like an emotionally intelligent adult”), for “making stuff ‘weird’ the whole time”, for “getting too heady”, and mostly for making “everything get weird and come to the surface”-

– You didn’t want the weirdness to come to the surface, you wanted it hidden in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationship. The Weirdness, as I see it, is not that you are an emotional man who needs a woman’s love; the weirdness is in your expectations of what a love relationship should be. What you expected in regard to a relationship with B is not sustainable:

* When you ask a woman a question, you need to be open to her answering your question her way, instead of expecting a particular answer and then getting angry that she didn’t answer your question your way.

* When you called the relationship with her a “platonic friendship”, you apply the “don’t ask, don’t tell” principle to you and you, meaning, you don’t ask yourself (ex., is this a friendship or something else?), and you don’t tell yourself (ex., I am physically attracted to her, I want her physically!).

You apply this principle to you-and-you, and to you and her. You can’t have an intimate, getting-closer relationship with this principle at its center.

This don’t-ask-don’t-tell principle does not change the reality that you don’t want to “come to the surface”. That reality exists nonetheless, and it will not be hidden just because you want it hidden.

* You are too angry with her. From one point on, you freaked out, got to be too emotional, this is why she wanted you relaxed (“wanted to go back to being casual, and relaxed, friends again”). The weirdness is that you don’t seem to be aware of how emotional you are, denying your own emotions and blaming her for the fact that the emotions you deny come to the surface from time to time, more frequently since B broke up with you.

anita