Dear espressopasss:

You are welcome.

I will summarize her story as you shared it: she is 31, four years older than you, a superior colleague at your workplace who married at the beginning of 2020. She was unhappy with her relationship right from the beginning: he put little effort in it and she put a lot of effort, money and time in it. At one time while with him on the third floor, they had some kind of fight and he asked her to jump off the third floor. She then prepared to jump and he pulled her back in. While engaged to him she also traveled to another country so to check out a man who was romantically interested in her.

During the relationship with her then boyfriend turned fiancé, she carried on a romantic- physically intimate relationship with you. And when she married him, she had you as her bridesmaid. Overall, you were “always there by her side. Always.. drop everything .. to attend to her needs.. Sending her to and from work, driving her to get her groceries, accompanying her whenever her SO was away.. doing her work… you name it”. Every time you tried to distant yourself from her, she pulled you back in, complaining that you don’t love her after all, causing you to feel guilty.

When you suggested that maybe she shouldn’t marry him, she told you that she invested too much time, effort and money in him, that it is too late to call it off because she went public with the relationship, and because it will be difficult for her immediate family to explain themselves to other family members, that she is too old to start over, and that she is “destined to be ‘unlucky’ in love”.

My input: she may be a good employee in the workplace setting, but she is not good at personal relationships. I imagine her relationships with her parents are pretty bad, that she is anxious about displeasing them and that’s why she didn’t consider a breakup, so to not inconvenience them. With the man she married, a bad relationship as well. You were her filler relationship, filling the big gaps in her life with a little feel-good comfort, making her difficult life a little easier.

Her being in your life is not a good deal for you, because you receive so little for what you give and there is no improvement in sight. For her, it’s about feeling better from time to time, but you are not and will not change the great relationship-dysfunction in her life.

Did she tell you about her troubled relationships with her parents?

anita