Thanks Anita!

It’s a good question.

I know that there were certainly lots of childhood wounds opened here but I honestly have not experienced anything like this since I have been an adult. I have never had someone show me so much interest, say so many things that indicated how much they cared and how valuable I was to them and then just virtually overnight shut it all down as if it never happened. It was like she flipped a switch. I have never had this happen to me in any relationship I have ever had, friendship or otherwise.

Here is what I think it really comes down to for me –  I know I basically got used, and manipulated, by someone who I have known for two decades and I thought was a good friend.

It’s been very tough for me to reconcile everything she said, and did, as we got closer, to where we are now. It’s also tough because she has to know that all of the explanations, and things she has said, since this went down don’t add up but yet she keeps saying the same things.   And it’s hard because I know that I am probably not the only guy friend this happened with since she has  been this place with her marriage. I am about 90% sure that there is some other guy friend she is running through the same “dance” she did with me for that year period of time.

So what I have decided to do is completely let it all go, stop engaging with her on social media, and just assume this friendship is over and focus on whether or not I can make my marriage work.  I just have to accept the fact that sometimes we never get answers and that is the answer.

Hey Anita,

I just wanted to report back here because you were kind enough to help out and I am guessing folks don’t always let you know how situations play out.  Anyway, much to my surprise, I did actually hear from my friend.

After the last time I had emailed her, about a week before Christmas, I had been checking every couple of days for a response and after not receiving one I just assumed it might be awhile. As it turns out,  she  had responded even during the time we were going back and forth here.

In a nutshell,  her response was that she appreciated the effort I was putting in to maintaining the friendship and she said that for the past several months almost all of her focus has been on her kids and her new business. She said she has not really been communicating with anyone and that even her best friend had asked what the heck was going on with her. An interesting thing she pointed out was that a business associate had told her she was making a mistake staying in her marriage  because she could die tomorrow but her response was that this was precisely why she was staying – so she wouldn’t miss the time with her kids. The rest of the email was just the normal banter we used to always engage in before.  I did respond to her and I think I will give her a call maybe in the next couple of weeks  to hopefully take things out of the email world.  With all of this said, however, I still think there is a missing “piece” here and it relates specifically to our friendship.

What really reminded me of this was about a day after I responded to her, a Facebook Memory from a year ago popped where I had done a post regarding Friendship and how those change sometimes and you have to move on. Her comment on that post was something to the effect of “I haven’t heard from you recently – should I be worried?” “Recently” probably meant I hadn’t called, or texted, her in three days at most. So clearly something pretty significant changed with her which made her go from worrying something was wrong with our friendship after not talking for a few days to her being okay not talking to me for five months.

Anyway, I am sure at some point I will have some answers but I am not going to push for those right now.

As to my mother I wouldn’t say she let me down but my childhood was a bit unstable for probably the first 12 years because of her poor selection in men and because she had an extremely dysfunctional relationship with her own mother (think the Joan Crawford portrayal in Mommie Dearest).  We moved quite a bit and the men she got involved with didn’t treat her the best. Not what I would call physical abuse but men who were just very emotionally unavailable “bad boys.” Not sure if this helps. As to my wife, that  situation  has been pretty tough for years.

When I first reached out to B to offer her some extra support with some stuff she was going  through at the time my wife and I were not talking at all.  So when B almost immediately started texting, and calling me,  and expressing a real interest in me it felt really good to have someone  who seemed to care about me and see me.  And when I told B about my situation with my wife  I think B felt it was kind of “open season” when it came to reaching out to me and contacting me.

But the truth was I was not in the same situation B was with her husband. They were already not sharing a bedroom and were essentially just in this mode of co-parenting their kids and trying not to argue. I wasn’t there with my wife, and I am still not, and at times I had to back off on my friendship with B because my wife was really starting to have a major problem with our friendship. It got to a point where my wife pretty much hated B and viewed her as existential threat to our marriage.

Initially my wife had requested B and I not see each other as much alone than it went to not wanting us to text, or talk on the phone, and it finally got to a point where my wife literally didn’t want me even liking anything B posted on social media. She flat out told me she would like B to disappear completely. But from my angle I have given up a lot of things to accommodate my wife over the years and while I was okay with reducing my friendship down with B I didn’t feel it was fair of my wife to expect me to completely ex-communicate B from my life.  But I am sure that B picked up on all this and I am also sure I came off at times as being a bit unavailable or aloof.

I think I mentioned this but one of the last things that happened before things went “South” was that B made a flirtatious comment on one of my Facebook posts, which I could in no way respond to, and she deleted it the next day.  I know she made that post to get my attention and I know she got rid of it because she knew it would probably tick my wife off – which it did. But truthfully, when B came into the picture I was literally at a place where I was considering whether I was going to move forward with my marriage. I think her presence probably complicated things a bit and made it hard for me to really work through what I wanted at that time.  And obviously going on lock down with Coronavirus further changed things up quite a bit.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Timepassages2070.

Thanks for your kindness in helping me with this issue. I have to tell you it has been really been playing on my mind for months. I also wanted to address some comments you made previously about my needs to be special or be number 1 with her.

I can tell you that what has taken place here definitely did drag up some childhood abandonment issues I experienced with my father but those really have not come up in many years. I reconciled with my father over twenty years ago and we had a pretty solid relationship until he passed over a decade ago. In terms of my relationship with my mother – well that has always been extremely solid and I think it’s one of the reasons I have had a pretty easy time connecting with women as friends since I have been older.  Women just tend to trust me and feel pretty safe around me so I am sure that’s what she probably felt as well. Most of my really super close friends are men, however,  but these were friendships I formed back in my college and graduate school days.

Also, I have never really had any blatant abandonment issues in romantic relationships or friendships since probably Middle School. I only bring this up to point out the fact that I believe this situation with my friend really triggered some long dormant issues. I also have to say that my issue was never to be thought of as important or special to her but to just be treated as the good friend I believed  I had started to become to her.  I didn’t believe this because I had imagined it or just wished for it and, in fact, it took me a while to catch on that this is what she wanted.

I only picked up on this because normally when we used to text back and forth one of us would just stop texting and it was no big deal. I did this one time, she called me the next day and actually asked if we were still friends. She actually thought because she made a joke that I might have found offensive (which I didn’t by the way) that I would actually end our friendship just randomly after twenty years. She actually would get extremely insecure if I didn’t respond to a text, or voicemail, fast enough. In addition to going on Social Media and making comments indicating she wanted me to reach out so blatant that my wife would ask about it there was one specific occasion where I had been taking some distance and she literally called me multiple days in row and flat out said she would keep calling until she got me on the phone.

So by all of this I assumed, and I think rightly so, that we had reached a certain level of friendship. I certainly get that friendships “ebb & flow”  but an “ebb” isn’t someone completely trying redefine a friendship over a period of a couple of weeks and even pretend that they hadn’t gotten as close as they had. I think a situation like this would, at a minimum, trigger a whole lot of questions in even the most secure person on the planet. Most people I believe would ask what was going on and if they got an answer that just didn’t make sense, or add up, given the context of the friendship they would most likely push for more answers.

In terms of the friend she was annoyed with I should clarify. This friend is someone I believe she has known since childhood and he was trying to connect with her for coffee (as I used to connect with her). It’s possible this may have been the friend she almost crossed the line with but, and not to be superficial, I just don’t see her being all that attracted to this guy in that way. But he comes from an extremely wealthy, and influential family, in a particular business. I do know she did eventually meet with him, and another male friend, to pitch him a business idea which he wasn’t interested in pursuing. But my point in bringing him up is that I think it’s possible she may have given him some indication that there was at least a possibility there or told him about her situation with her husband.

As to why I was initially doubting she had any type of sexual relationship going on with anyone is because she made some statements regarding how she still viewed herself as being married and even was pretty judgmental about some guy trying to cross a line with one her married friends. I don’t want to say my friend is uptight but I will say that, at a minimum, she really wants to project a certain image. A couple of other facts I should add in are that she is extremely introverted and can get pretty obsessive when it comes to her business and can lose track of time.

I do think it’s possible that she perhaps had started dating, or decided to take another friendship to a different level when I felt her distance, and that’s what I actually thought might be going on. In terms of her wanting our friendship to go back to being relaxed and casual. Keep in mind that my “freak out” email only happened as a result of the way she responded when I just casually said I noticed her distancing.

It wasn’t that she didn’t respond any specific way it was that her email seemed to be her trying to redefine our friendship but doing it under the “guise”  of saying she needed space from everyone and expressing all of this annoyance with chasing down friends and text messages not being returned. The two things that triggered me in that email were her comment about how their was a particular person she could write a paragraph about and when she wrapped up the email basically making it seem as if when we would  connect again was up to fate or something. I took that comment about a particular person to mean someone she was possibly dating but I see now that she may been referring to a girlfriend.  But I do think this was more about putting some distance in our friendship than any other friendships she has.

In terms of where that connection was leading to, or where I wanted it to lead to I honestly don’t know that I wanted it to lead anywhere at the time I just knew I really like getting this close to someone again. I kind of was hoping for things to stay status quo but I guess, if I am being honest, I could see that had things kept progressing, and we got in this pattern of spending more and more time together it could eventually go to a place that would not have been good.  And now again, I am having another click here.

Right before the distancing kicked in we had not only been talking a lot more but had seen each other a couple of times over a period of a few weeks which is something we normally didn’t do. Had we done that yoga session we would have seen each other on a weekly basis. The last time we got together I did ask to connect the following week and I think had we done that we may have been getting into a realm of what might be akin to dating. Perhaps she was just trying to take a bit of distance at that time and nothing more and I read a whole bunch of things into this that I perhaps didn’t need to.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Timepassages2070.

In terms of people sharing certain intimate details of their life with complete strangers and not being willing to share other things I don’t believe this was, or is, the case here. I was one of the first people she chose to tell about divorcing her husband and, in fact, many people in their lives still think they are a normal married couple. And in her last email to me she flat out told me I was one of the only male friend s she had told about her situation (which I don’t believe is true but I’ll get to that)

In addition, one the reasons I have experienced so much cognitive dissonance with this situation is she made a point several times over the course of the past year of letting me know how close she had come to consider me. In fact, she had flat out told me I was one of the top people on her “list” (I believe she said top 3) of people. She had also made it pretty clear to me that getting close to people, and opening up, was something she really struggled with in relationships. The last couple of times we met for coffee she literally called me afterwards to tell me how much she appreciated me and my friendship and multiple times she said she had never had a friend like me.  She felt so comfortable with our friendship that literally a few weeks before the shift she had wanted me to do a private yoga session at the house of another mutual female friend who teaches yoga. I think the reason she reached out about this is because this mutual friend had been pushing to do a session with me a alone and I am pretty sure that my friend inserted herself because she probably wasn’t totally okay with me doing this session alone.

But also, when I look back at the way things went down with her I think she may have been giving me the information she needed to give me and telling me the things she believed I wanted to hear in order to get the attention and support she needed at that time. She mentioned in her last email that I was “one of the only male friends he told about her situation” but I don’t think this was accurate in the way she meant it in her email.

When we had initially started  getting close she had mentioned that when stuff was  initially going bad in her marriage she had almost crossed a line with another male friend but chose not to which at the time I admired and kind of understood given her situation. But in retrospect that probably should have been a “red flag”. My friend has been with her husband for well over twenty years and I don’t know many people who have been with their spouse that length of time who would have anyone still in their life where “crossing a line” would be possible. So it made me suspect that she may have had one or two male friends who had constantly been circling her that she perhaps reached out to when stuff was going bad at home.

The other “red flag”, and it may have been the same friend, is that I recall there being another male friend who was trying to meet up with her when he was in town and she mentioned that he had become annoying and was sending her emails, and even songs, expressing his feelings for her. This “friend” is a guy in his mid-forties, has known her for decades like me, is single and has a career in which he is constantly meeting hundreds of beautiful young attractive women. No disrespect to my friend but I don’t see a guy like this wasting his time on a married woman in her mid-forties with kids unless she had told him about her situation and had given him the idea that maybe there was a possibility for something more.  And one final “red flag” is that she did mention a couple of times that she has a hard time keeping friends. I was not sure what to make of this comment at the time but it was an odd comment to make especially since we had been friends for so many years – but not close friends.

So why I don’t think my friend is running around trying to leave a path of destruction and broken hearts I do think the situation she is currently in is perhaps causing her to cross, and perhaps, push boundaries in her friendships with men. She made a point of mentioning several times that she could never imagine dating, or trusting, anyone again but she is a human being and human beings have needs. I don’t necessarily see her engaging in a full on relationship with another man right now because I think she does consider herself married still but I could see her “using” male friends as a way to get some of those “emotional needs” met until her and her husband ultimately separate. And if she has done this multiple time since she has been in this situation I could see how it has ended friendships and resulted in a lot of confusion.

Thanks so much for your insights because they have caused me to do a bit more reflection and come to some conclusions.

First, I think, for the time being at least, I need to let go, back away, and let The Universe take control for a while. The fact is that my friend is not going anywhere and I don’t believe our journey together is over.  We have been in each other’s lives for twenty years and I believe there is a reason for that. I just think that perhaps some actual “emotional distance” on my part in which I truly let go of this situation will help me. Secondly, I think that I should have been honest with myself, and with her, about my true feelings.

While I didn’t intend for things to go this direction as I got closer to her, and let my guard down, I started to have feelings for her that were much stronger that friendship. I can’t say that I started to fall in love with her but I do know that my internal feelings were crossing boundaries. I think perhaps she had some feelings too but regardless it probably would have been helpful when I felt things  starting to go in a certain direction to just stop, reflect, and have an honest discussion with each other. If she had chosen to walk away from me, or we had mutually chosen to back away from the friend for a time, that would have been better than  months of limbo. And finally, I need to forgive her.

Yes, I know there are issues on my side, and I certainly could have handled things better, but my anger, which you picked up on, comes from the fact that instead of just having an honest conversation with me as to what was really going on with her she chose to “gas light”  me by pretending we hadn’t gotten close and all of things that she said, and did, over the past year never happened.

This was extremely hurtful and it made me feel like she used me like an appliance of some sort she  until she got bored, or a better situation came along,  and she decided to just put me back up on the shelf until she needed me again.  And this is not how friendships work unless you’re someone with some pretty severe narcissistic tendencies.  In addition, if she viewed me as a bit more than a friend so when something else started happening in her life she felt compelled to change the dynamic of our friendship she should have been willing to just openly discuss so I am not sitting out here feeling like I got broken up with when I wasn’t even aware I was in that type of relationship.

The fact is she had no problem telling me intimate details of not only what happened in her marriage but what was currently happening on a day to day basis so she should have had no problem discussing other things she may have had going on. The only reason she would  have withheld information from me is if she wasn’t viewing me 100% as a friend and she thought if she disclosed certain things to she wouldn’t have gotten the same level of attention from me which would not have been the case. I told her dozens of times I just wanted her to find happiness in her life which I sincerely meant.

But, regardless of what’s going on with her, and what her reasons were, the best thing I can do is find peace within myself. I need to assume she is doing the best she can and that she never intended to hurt me, and ultimately forgive her. I think the time for me to reach out to her will be when I have reached true peace with this situation and I have let go of any anger, resentment and hurt, surrounding this situation.

Thanks so much for your well thought out response.

As for my wife, I think she probably would have told me if she had approached her- it’s not really her style. And I suspect my friend would have said something at some point so while it’s a possibility I doubt it. But I will say communication has always been an issue and I think there were “mixed signals” from both sides.

As we got closer there was this constant pattern of hot-cold/push-pull. Our communication pattern tended to go something like this: 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.”  We would come to what would be a “natural” end of a great week of communicating and then one more text, or voicemail, would come from her. I would respond and she either wouldn’t respond for several days or she would act like I was the one who reached out to her. I once literally said to her “are you just testing to make sure I am still available?”  She didn’t answer the question but she called me like five minutes later.

But 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.  But with that said what was really strange about this 180 with her is that before it started to happen things were getting a lot more consistent with communication and seeing each other. We saw each other several times over June and July and our last conversation in August (which makes me sad) was great.

In terms of her wanting to cross the line  I have considered that but I was pretty expressive in telling her how I felt about her. Not in a romantic way but I am sure it would have been enough to make her feel comfortable in directly expressing something to me if she wanted to do that. But, with that said,  my friend is a bit of enigma because she is an excruciatingly beautiful woman who is also an introvert that clearly has some major intimacy issues when it comes to getting close to people.

Looking back there were times she did, and said, things that after the fact were probably her way of flirting. The one thing she did which really set my wife on the “war path”  is that we belong to same theatre company and last year when were doing some improv exercises for an audience, which my wife was apart of, my friend sat in my lap. This was extremely out of character for her to do this because she is not what I would call “touchy feely” and to do it when my wife was there just blew mind. I really wanted to say to her “you realize you just made it that much more difficult for us to hang out?” And the “funny” thing is that afterwards she knew my wife would probably be pissed and told me to apologize on her behalf. But in terms of me “crossing” any line that would have been a “lose lose.”

For one thing, and not to be “Captain Obvious”, no matter how troubled our respective marriages are we are both married. She still lives with her husband and they our holding themselves out as still being in stable marriage. So regardless of the moral implications this would be throwing gasoline on a couple of small fires and turning them into raging infernos that would devastate all kinds of people.

Secondly, since she was not giving what I would call “clear” signals if I made any type of move she could have said I completely misread things. She would have thought I was a complete scum bag and I would have ended up losing a twenty year friendship with someone I really care about. So yeah, maybe she did want me to cross the line but her behavior was so all over the place.

My take here is that she perhaps didn’t know what the heck she wanted but she liked the emotional support, validation and encouragement she would normally get from a significant other. I also know she probably liked all of the nice things I said to her which gave her quite the ego boost at times. In addition while I am not saying she thinks I am all that I am sure she finds me attractive so getting all of this attention from me probably felt nice. That’s why my initial theory as to what happened, which she did not take very well, was that there may have been another male “friend” that was more available to her, or maybe she even flat out started dating someone, and no longer needed the same level of attention she was getting from me.

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 she had something else going on.  But I think when I picked up on something being amiss  it gave her “permission” to ask for a full on  “break”. Maybe she just felt if she kept me at bay long enough by the time we connected again I wouldn’t care what she had going on or maybe it would have run it’s course.

But honestly, I couldn’t care less if she is seeing someone or if she has, or had, feelings for me because I truly just want her friendship back in my life. I just wish there was a way to get her to just communicate with me like an emotionally intelligent adult. I mean we have never had any major arguments and the one misunderstanding we had over a year ago we talked through in like five minutes. 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.