Dear Nekoshema:

Regarding your former friend, the one you shared about in your Dec 2019 thread and in this thread, it was a very flirtatious relationship and you somewhat fell in love with him: “We had a very flirtatious relationship, and I genuinely don’t mind when he plays footsies with me, massages my shoulders, rests his arm against mine at movies, or sits a little too close  besides me at the table… a ton of moments I’ve had with him where he would cuddle to me, which has doubled in frequency since he started dating his girlfriend.. I can totally see how his behaviour is crossing a line, even if I’m comfortable with it.. Perhaps I’ve fallen for the friend I see when I’m alone with him.. I don’t want to believe I’ve fallen for someone as calculating.. he’s always encouraging me to grow as a person, he wants to grow as a person, and he’s always talking about how much he loves people who insist on growing.. As for  our flirtatious friendship, my fiancé is fine with it because he knows it’s harmless and nothing would happen (we have a very open, honest relationship), he’s more concerned my friend will cross the line”-

– it is interesting how much you wrote about this former friend in your Dec 2019 thread and how little you wrote about your boyfriend turned fiancé in all of your threads. In the above quote, you put your fiancé in parenthesis, while your former friend received paragraph after paragraph outside parentheses.

Also of interest to me is how critical you were of your former friend while maintaining the flirtatious relationship and while believing somewhat that he saved you (a word you used) and helped you grow. For  one, you were very critical of him for having a confident persona around people, a persona that was not his real self. You expressed this attitude of.. ridiculing him for being a justice fighter and whatnot. And his girlfriend/ your co worker, my goodness, you definitely disliked her all along, not  minding, to  say the least, that her boyfriend flirted with you in her presence.

Another point of interest (I am thinking as I type) is that you have no idea why your former friend ghosted you. He expressed to you earlier that he was into confronting people, like his toxic relatives (a term you used), and yet.. he didn’t confront you with why he decided to ghost you, leading to you not knowing the reason. And you have mutual friends who are still  in your life.. and they didn’t help you figure out the reason. All the information you have is that his girlfriend told you that he is mad at you.

I wonder what all this means… I am thinking that there is an Honesty Deficiency (HD, a term I just came up with, lol), an HD in the context of the following relationships: (1) between you and your friend, now former friend, (2) between you and your former friend’s girlfriend/ your coworker and something of a friend, at times, and I suspect (3) between you and your fiancé, and perhaps in all of your relationships.

And I am thinking: if you type less, outside and inside parentheses, typing slowly and seeing to it that what you  type is honest, it will help. I don’t mean that you lie, no, I don’t mean that, HD is not the same as  lying.

anita