Dear Tineoidea,

What happened with my friend and her, is uncanny similar to the “triangulation” performed by narcissists where they put your friends against you and then may use them as their next supply.

Actually, your former friend sounds like a narcissist. He first tried to manipulate you against her, and when that didn’t work out, he turned against you. This is how he behaved at the beginning:

A “friend” I’ve known for a long time, became jealous and angry about her “replacing” him and began to project all sort of delusions onto her, such as her being a pretender that will only harm me, will tear us two apart and so on (ironically prophetic).
He became rather nasty with her, treating her like a lesser being.

He told you she was a pretender that will only harm you. I can imagine he later said the same about you – that you are a pretender who will only harm her. And for some reason, she believed him. In fact, you said she admitted she was the one who sought contact with him, even though he treated her badly in the beginning (I’ve had a very heated conversation with her recently, with a lot of emotions, mixed signals and her saying that it is her who chose to engage with him actively and let him in).

For some reason, she sought his company and wanted to stay close to him. Could it be that she used him as a source of “confidential information” about you because she didn’t know you well enough, while he was your long-time friend? You also said: My legal and economic situations are very convoluted though and so the progress has been slow, nevertheless we had the plan B or simply marrying to get me out of this swamp.

Could it be that she didn’t like your “convoluted legal and economic situation”, and that this, together with the manipulation and lies by your former friend, caused her to give up on getting married to you? I don’t know anything about the legal situation you find yourself in, but I can imagine that a problematic legal status can repel a person, specially if they are risk averse and fear getting in any kind of legal trouble by associating/being married to you (this is just an assumption, please disregard if it’s not applicable to your situation and you didn’t represent any kind of legal risk for her).

Because she exhibited complete lack of empathy and care towards me, who was also her closest friend when all of this went down. I’ve been discarded as if nothing had happened in between us, treated very poorly and emotionally abused for weeks.

She was conflicted. You said that at times she was loving and affectionate, at other times she was rude and angry. It’s like two sides fought inside of her, and in the end, her mistrust prevailed. Clearly, she didn’t treat you well, but still, she doesn’t seem like a narcissist to me, however your male friend does.