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.