Dear Timepassages2070:

You are very welcome. I think that emotional distance from her, at this point, is a good idea.

About honesty, you wrote: “I should have been honest with myself, and with her, about my true feelings… I think perhaps she had some feelings too… it probably would have been helpful.. to just stop, reflect, and have an honest discussion with each other… that would have been better than months of limbo… my anger.. comes from the fact that instead of just having an honest conversation with me.. she chose to.. pretend.. we hadn’t gotten close and all of the things that she said, and did, over the past year never happened… she should have been willing to just openly discuss so I am not sitting out here feeling like I got broken up with”-

– Keep in mind that the lack of honesty was both ways, and therefore, you are responsible, no less than her, for those months of limbo. For your part of lack of honesty- you are responsible 100%.

About her placing you “in a ‘pile’ of people she needed space from”, and in so doing, pretending (the verb you used) that the closeness that you felt to her, the closeness you believed she experienced too- did not happen and was never there-

– Such pretending, or re-interpreting/ re-classifying of past reality, is very common; people and repeatedly do this. The reality of what was happening distressed her too much, so she took that reality and placed it, so to speak, in a  drawer, and closed that drawer. That made the content of that drawer (the past reality) no longer visible to her, and therefore no longer distressing. (Earlier, you used the verb to compartmentalize, to suggest that she did what I am describing here).

It is a retroactive mental processing of an original, real-life, distressing experience, for the purpose of making it less distressing. (People often do that regarding their childhoods).

“This was extremely hurtful and it made me feel like she used me.. until she got bored.. she decided to just put me back up on the shelf until she needed me again”- I don’t see it being an issue of boredom on her part. I see it as an issue of her re-classifying/ compartmentalizing the relationship so to lower her distress.

“this is not how friendships work”- a workable, healthy relationship, overall, has to result in less distress for each individual, not more distress. When any one individual experiences too much distress, for too long (too long can be minutes, hours, months or years, depending on the context), the individual withdraws from the relationship in one way or another.

“The fact is she had no problem telling me intimate details of not only what happened in her marriage but what currently happening on a day to day basis, so she should have had no problem discussing other things she may have had going on”-

– Not necessarily so. First, some people feel comfortable telling just anyone/ strangers intimate details about their lives. Second, people have various levels of comfort/ discomfort depending on the topic. It may be difficult for you to talk to others about topic X, so when a person talks to you about X, you think that it means that it was difficult for her too, and that she trusted you/ felt close to you. But for her, it may not mean that. For her, talking about topic Y is difficult while for you, Y is not difficult to talk about.

anita