Dear Ishita:

I am not as refreshed this morning as I hoped to be. Nonetheless, I spent a few hours studying your thread. This is my current understanding (what I understand now may develop and change if we communicate further, as I insert new information into the old, but here is what it is now):

At some point on, and definitely by November 2020, your friendship with X progressed from friendship to a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship but without actual dating and sexual activity, and without the public use of the labels boyfriend and girlfriend (he privately addressed you as “bae”, which is a term used for a girlfriend).

The November 2020- mid January 2021 relationship included (1) an ongoing, deep emotional exchange, a “level or intensity of communication” that was not there before, when you were only friends. He spent a whole lot of his time taking with you, even when he was sleepy, he told you that “he was very much over his ex”, that you meant so much to him (“almost everyday assert it very clearly how much I meant to him”), showering you with compliments, and being there for you when you needed him, and (2) mutual flirting, including “real dirty flirting” (“We used to flirt a lot, he.. started calling me bae… we used to have some real dirty flirting”).

In mid-January this year you felt that “he started pulling hot and cold” on you, not calling you as often as he did in December, and you “felt like he wasn’t putting enough effort” into the relationship. You got angry about the change in his behavior: “I used to get upset if he forgot to or maybe just chose to not call me in two or three days”. You let him know that you were angry in ways that he considered “being ‘dramatic'”. He then told you that he was being lazy and that he “should definitely call you everyday”, but following having said that, he did not call you every day.

You were angry about this discrepancy: you “had always been there for him.. never allowed anyone to do something wrong to him in the club”, but he was there for you sometimes, “dependent on his mood”.

What happened next is that being angry at him (suggested by your use of big print letters), you let him know that you are taking a break from the relationship: “I TOLD HIM I NEEDED SOME DISTANCE… I NEED TO TAKE SOME TIME”!

He said that “he was ok with this“, but he “didn’t take it very well”, this and it being the break from the relationship. He called you, and you talked to him, restricting your talking to “what a general conversation between friends should be like”- that is, not including the previous deep emotional exchange and flirting.

He didn’t like being on a break, so he told you that “he would wait” until you were “ready to go back to being normal… He is still waiting for me to recover and end the distance clause”- he wants you to end the break and resume the unlabeled, undefined, uncommitted relationship.

“even though we were never in an actual relationship, I have trusted him throughout.. I had this idea of him that he is actually a gentleman, and he is mature enough to know the boundaries of a friendship with a female friend (which I still think he knows clearly, but behaves like he has no idea… He has indulged in gaslighting me at times”.

My concluding thoughts: clearly you are an anxious person, exhibiting what is known as anxious attachment style, but this is not The Problem here. The Problem is that X is dishonest.

You shared, and I believe you, that you don’t feel comfortable around people until you get to know them well, otherwise, your guard is up for a long time (“I used to generally have my guard on around even my good friends.. I don’t go around heavily flirting with my guy friends”).

It was because X went out of his way to behave like a caring, loving boyfriend- that you let your guard down, with him.

There is a saying: “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck”, and I add to the saying: it’s a duck even if the duck doesn’t say the words: I am a duck!

X talked like a boyfriend, behaved like a boyfriend, so you believed that he was indeed your boyfriend. Even though he didn’t say the words: I am your boyfriend.

* Do you know anything about his childhood experience?

You asked a few questions previously. Take your time, if you will, and let me know what you think of my understanding and what your questions might be, at this point.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by .

Dear Ishita,

Sorry, I thought it was very recent, and that you started to get back together again. But I understand now that before you took a break from the relationship, you had hot and cold phases, and this was one such “warming up” phase after a colder period. You still didn’t know at that point that he wasn’t interested in a relationship. I get it now.

Well, although in this particular incident he doesn’t seem very guilty, he had led you on, heavily flirted with you and gave you false hopes during November/December. And he probably knew what he was doing, since he recognized such behavior in other guys.

You have put him “on hold” and now your relationship is strictly formal (extremely formal on his side), but he’s waiting for your decision and for resuming the relationship in some form.

If I understood well, you now want to completely break off the friendship, because he betrayed your trust and you could never trust him again.

You’re in a dilemma about whether to:

• call him immediately and tell him that the friendship is over, or wait until your common project ends, to create less commotion,
• and if you call him, whether to tell him openly about the reasons for breaking-off the friendship and trying to make him see his mistake or not

These are your questions and dilemmas:

I think I should let him know (on call), that he shouldnt wait, and more than that I want to let him know that he just hurt me so bad that I cant even think of being friends with him (but I dont want to explain him why I think so, because I think I am done with that and I dont know what his reaction will be like, I seriously wouldnt want to get into an argument with him then)

Would that be a stupid idea,? And if not, would it be better if I call him right away since I feel this suffering or should I wait for this project to end peacefully first?

Now, the thing is I feel I shouldnt , sort out with him whatever I am feeling right now, because somewhere I feel, he would still not own up to his part of mistake, and instead would either defend himself by not analysing deeply or would indulge in gaslighting. So, I dont know if this confessing would actually help me let go or not?

But a part of me also believes that if he cared even a bit about me, then maybe he will understand and have a bit of remorse at least.

But I dont know what to do?

It’s not easy to tell, but perhaps you could wait for the project to end, and then talk to him. As for trying to explain to him how he betrayed your trust, you may want to do it, since it seems in your nature to want to explain things and not leave things unspoken and unresolved, if possible. So you might want to try to explain how he betrayed your trust, and that you don’t buy that he was clueless about what he was doing. You can try to “make your case”, and see his reaction.

The worst that can happen is that he again tries to gaslight you – to deny that there was any inappropriate behavior on his side and refuse his responsibility for misleading you. If you can deal with such denial, without starting to doubt yourself – so if you’re strong enough and able to deal with his potential gaslighting – then do it. If on the other hand you feel that he would be merciless and vicious (he might be if he is a narcissist) and that it would hurt you even more, then don’t do it.

That’s the best I can come up so far… but it’s not easy to decide, perhaps there are more things to take  into consideration.

Dear Ishita:

In this post I will retell your conversations with X part by part (following the “*”), and comment on each part (following an “-“).

* He told you that he “really wanted to resolve this because he was finding it very weird, to behave like a stranger with (you)”, and he asked if there was anything you and him could do to resolve “this distance thing”. You said: “no..”, that this friendship meant too much to you and that you are sad and angry that the two of you had let “this go down the drain so easily, and it can’t be the same anymore, maybe”-

– so far, early in the conversation, he sounds calm, reasonable, mature and sincere, wanting to resolve the conflict and re-establish a friendship with you, while you sound too angry to think reasonably, too angry to address the conflict and try to resolve it.

* He told told you that he has no idea how to talk to you, not wanting to be too formal or too friendly. You suggested that he talks to you “just the way he does with other not so close members of the club, if that’s comfortable to him”-

– your suggestion is not helpful (1) because you and X talked a lot privately, one-to-one, and you don’t know if and how he talks to other club members privately, (2) “not so close” it vague, (3) you diverted the topic from your relationship with him to his relationships with other people.

* You told him that there is probably no way for you to be able to trust him again, particularly if he continues to think that he was not at all “at fault even to the slightest extent” for you “ending up in this pit”. He asked you to give him exact examples of instances when you felt in a pit in regard to him. You refused to give him examples, suggesting that he is a baby (telling him that you will not babysit him), and telling him that he  is smart enough to figure it all out by himself-

– so far, he sounds calm, reasonable, mature and sincere in his efforts to understand the conflict with you. It sounds like he wants to know specific examples of when you felt in a pit when interacting with him, so that he can find out what he said and did that may have caused you to feel in the pit, and change his behavior accordingly.  You, on the other hand,  sound angry, hostile and unreasonable, refusing to give him examples, insulting him (suggesting he is a baby), and wanting him to feel at fault without giving him examples of what you think he did wrong to you, and when.

* You told him that if you give him examples, “he would just try to defend himself”, making you feel stupid and manipulated-

– if in previous conversations with him, you did give hi specific examples and and he gaslighted you, (you mentioned earlier that he gaslighted you), then your refusal to repeat the information you already gave him (or give him new information) and be gaslighted again- is understandable. For example, if you told him in the past that when he called you bae, you felt that he wanted to be your boyfriend, but later after you confessed your feelings for him and he told you that he doesn’t want to be in a relationship with you, you felt devastated/ “in this pit”, and his response was something like: I never called you “bae” (but he did!), or, I called you “bae” because you asked me to call you that (and you didn’t!)- that would be gaslighting you.

*He asked you to explain things to him so that he will know the things he “shouldn’t do to someone next time”-

– Again, he sounds calm, reasonable, mature and sincere.

* You then “tried to explain to him”, telling him that you and him had “a lot of unnecessary expectations from each other.. leading to fights”, and you suggested that these expectations were not appropriate to “just friends”. His response: “I always felt they were resolvable, so I didn’t mind”. You asked him if he enjoys fighting with “just friends” over expectations almost every day. His response: “no, you aren’t the only one, I do have fights with 2-3 more friends”. You then asked him about his fights with his other friends-

– you finally brought up some information that can be addressed: expectations and fights that occurred between you and him almost every day, for some time. His response was that he always felt that they (the expectations and/ or the fights) were resolvable, so he didn’t mind. It could have been helpful if at this point, you asked him how (and when) the fights with you were to be resolved. But instead, you asked him if he enjoyed fighting with you, and he took the opportunity to divert the conversation from what happened between you and him to –>what happens between him and other friends.

* The conversations proceeds to be about him and another friend (Y). You then “swiftly changed it back to us.. (to) having expectations from each other”, and he again asked for examples of  when “over expectations could be the reason of a fight”. You gave him examples of when he over-expected from you, and “he had an explanation to each one of them, except one”, telling you that he over-expected from you just once, and the other examples you have him were not “really legit to be considered as over-expecting”-

–  having read your examples previously, your examples were “legit”. Seems to me that your examples were not convenient for him so he rejected them as illegitimate. He agreed to one example, for no other reason, but to maintain his appearance of being reasonable and mature (an unreasonable and immature person would reject everything and accept nothing).

* Next, you abandoned the topic of his over-expectations of you and pointed to your over-expectations of him: “it’s fine if he doesn’t feel he ever over expected, but what about the times when I did”-

– You referred to the many times when you told him that you think that maybe you are over-expecting from him, and he reassured you that you were not over-expecting from him, which led you to believe that your expectation that he is becoming your boyfriend was realistic.

* His response: that “he genuinely didn’t feel it was an issue, he didn’t feel I was over-expecting, to ask him to call me everyday”, etc., and that “he wasn’t lying, when he said he didn’t feel this was over-expecting”-

– As the conversation proceeded, he used your answers not so to have a meeting of the minds: an honest exchange of ideas with you, and not so to resolve your problem/ your conflict, but to resolve his problem alone. His problem is that you are angry at him, and he doesn’t want you (or anyone, I am guessing) to be angry at him. He wants you to be nice to him, like before. To achieve this aim, he appears calm, reasonable, mature and sincere, so to make you doubt yourself and change your behavior from Anger to Nice. He simply denies what is  convenient for him to deny, giving you a little something so that he appears mature.

* “At that point I didn’t really know what to say”-

– his gaslighting strategy succeeded, he did a good job confusing you.

* You then asked him how much of your devastation during the entire two months (what you called early in the conversation, “this pit”) period was his fault. His response: “just one event and apart from that whatever I did to you, I did it because you were my good friend”. You then “felt so much gaslighted at that moment”-

– he denied everything, gave you the gift of that “just one event”. But he gave you an even bigger gift when he referred to you (“suddenly.. for the first time”) as his “good friend”, and later, as his “best friend”. The purpose of this gift was to melt your anger, to make you feel guilty for being angry at a nice guy who thinks of you as his best friend, and cause your behavior to change from Angry to Nice.

* “I was breaking by then.. realising how much I want to be around him as a friend… I just knew that I really didn’t wish to lose him”-

– and he succeeded, your anger melted, at least for a while, and you ended up wanting to be around him as a friend, which means no longer angry at him.

My summary: britanica. com defines gaslighting as a “technique of deception and psychological manipulation, usually practiced by a single deceiver, or ‘gaslighter,’ on a single victim over an extended period. Its effect is to gradually undermine the victim’s confidence in his own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or reality from appearance… As part of the process, the victim’s self-esteem is severely damaged, and he becomes additionally dependent on the gaslighter for emotional support and validation… Some of the basic elements of the technique… flatly denying that one has said or done something that ne has obviously said or done; dismissing the victim’s contrary perceptions or feelings as invalid or pathological; questioning the knowledge and impugning the motives of persons who contradict the viewpoint of the gaslighter”, and more.

As you noticed, Ishita, the quote above includes the word “victim”. This young man we are discussing, X, in my developing understanding, is indeed dishonest and manipulative, fitting the term gaslighter, and you are his victim. Not a friend (or a girlfriend), mind you, but a victim.

To continue to communicate with him beyond the minimal formal communication needed in the context of the club you are involved with-  is to continue to damage your mental health: to doubt your valid perceptions and understandings, to be confused a lot of the time, and distressed, less and less able to evaluate other people and situations, etc.

No wonder, if what he told you was true, that his ex-girlfriend broke up with him because it was too stressful for her to be with him (“his girlfriend dumped him saying that she was feeling ‘stressed’ around him”)- it is indeed way too stressful to be in a close relationship of any kind (friendship or romantic) with a person like X.

Run away from him, Ishita, like your health depends on it- because it does!

anita