Dear Timepasseges2070:

You shared that you’ve been “good, but casual” friends with a woman for twenty years, getting together for coffee a few times a year. A few years ago, she informed you that she has been living with her husband as roommates for a couple of years by that time, and that she decided to ask him for a divorce. Later, you shared with her about your marriage that has been declining for years.

A year and a half ago, and for over a year, the two of you became “a lot closer”, being each other’s “main confidantes”, “never went more than a week without talking, or texting”, she “literally could not go more than a few days without texting or calling me for over a year.. would go on social media if I didn’t respond to a text, or voicemail, fast enough”, and the two of you got together more frequently than before. You became “pretty dependent on her over the past year”.

About four months ago, she “was starting to distance” from the friendship. You emailed her asking if everything was okay, with a low-key attitude, and her response was that “she was tired of chasing friends around and people not being responsive to her texts… she needed space from everyone”. You responded with a “freak out” email, and in response, she “asked for a break in our friendship”. You reached out to her, but “crickets”.

You wrote: “The last email exchange involved her telling me that he had not reconciled with her husband and that nothing had changed. But she did say she didn’t want to tick my wife off… I am really baffled.. my gut feeling tells me she still wants me in her life… but at the same time it almost feels like she is trying to keep me, and our friendship, at bay for some reason she doesn’t want to say. I am 90% sure it’s not because she is reconciling with her husband… But ultimately I truly miss having her in my life… part of me wonders if the issue is that she had feelings and just felt we had nowhere else to go without crossing a line. Or maybe she is afraid she is going to make my marriage worse”-

– My thoughts:

1. You came up with a few possibilities to explain the change in her behavior about 4 months ago. Here is a possibility that crossed my mind when I read: “The last email exchange involved her telling me… she didn’t want to tick my wife off”- maybe your wife approached her and confronted her, and that is why she backed off from you. I imagine you don’t think it possible, because you would have listed this as a possibility otherwise (?)

2. Another possibility that crossed my mind when I read that the two of you “never went more than a week without texting”, and that she “literally could not go more than a few days without texting or calling me for over a year… would go on social media if I didn’t respond to a text or voicemail, fast enough”- is that what you considered not fast enough, she considered too long: for a lot of people (maybe more so for women), going more than a day without texting with a close friend is too long, but for other people going three days without texting is not a big deal. The fact that she went on social media so to get your attention when you didn’t respond to her text or voicemail, indicates to me that she waited and waited for your response, getting distressed waiting. Eventually, she got tired or repeatedly waiting and distanced herself from you. This possibility fits with what she told you, that “she was tired of chasing friends around and people not being responsive to her texts”.

3. Regarding “part of me wonders if the issue is that she had feelings and just felt we had nowhere else to go without crossing the line”- a possibility crossed my mind that maybe she wanted to cross the line and was waiting for you to initiate such crossing. After some time that you didn’t cross the line, she withdrew (?)

You asked for advice regarding “just shooting her a casual text like I used to about some random thing”- I don’t know if this is a good idea, but if you offer me your thoughts about the possibilities I brought up, I will have more information and may be able to advise you.

anita

Dear Timepassages2070:

You wrote: “I truly just want her friendship back in my life. I just wish there was a way to get her to just communicate with me like an emotionally intelligent adult… I truly feel like she has made whatever is going on with her a much bigger deal than it needs to be because she thinks I am going to have some crazy reaction”.

You wrote about her: “She is an excruciatingly beautiful woman who is also an introvert that clearly has some major intimacy issues when it comes to getting close to people”.

Earlier you asked for advice regarding “just shooting her a casual text like I used to about some random thing”.

My current thoughts/ advice: seems to me that she is often on edge, excitable, over-reactive (?)- therefore, I imagine that sending her a casual, soft text about some random thing is your best bet. Anything deeper/ longer/ stronger than that may overwhelm/ over-excite her in a negative way. Does this make sense to you?

anita

Dear Timepasseges2070:

You are welcome. I read your recent post. I want to re-read all that you posted so far (and anything you may want to add to help me understand her and the situation better)  tomorrow morning when I am more focused than I am now. I will be back to you in about 14 hours from now.

anita

Dear Timepassages2070:

I will be spending a few hours re-telling your story, combining what you shared in your three posts, and my suggestions and interpretations (with evidence to these in the form of quotes).

You described “a platonic friendship”  with “an excruciatingly beautiful woman” (I will refer to this woman as B) for the past twenty  years. You are married and she is married to other people. For most of these 20 years it was a  “good, but casual” friendship where the two of you got together a few times a year for coffee.

A few years ago, B, an excruciatingly beautiful woman,  informed you that she decided to ask her husband for a divorce and that they have been living as roommates for a couple of years.

A year and a half ago, you and B, an excruciatingly beautiful woman,  “became a lot closer”. You became her confidante and she became yours. You shared with her that your marriage too that has been “in a decline for a long time”.

For over a year, the two of you “were getting together more frequently”, getting together several times during the summer in spite of Coronavirus raging, and  “literally never went more than a week without talking, or texting”. For a couple of months, it was a “pretty heavy contact with each other”, and you felt that the two of you “were starting to get even closer”.

But the communication between the two  of you “has always been an issue.. there were ‘mixed signals’ from both sides”. On your side: your wife cracked down on the closer friendship more and more, making it difficult for you to be as responsive to B as you wanted to be (“I do also have to be honest in that the more my wife cracked down the more difficult it did become for me to be as responsive as I wanted to be to her so I am sure that confused her as well”).

When your wife saw B sitting on your lap one time, during a theatre improv exercise, your wife was “really set.. on the ‘war path'”. You were angry at B for making it “much more difficult for us to hang out”.

On B’s side: “there was this constant pattern of hot-cold/ push-pull… one week she was sending me full paragraph text messages, responding immediately and the next week she would become what I would call ‘half-ass aloof'”. Sometimes “she wouldn’t respond for several days or she would act like I was the one who reached out to her”.

At one point, around last summer, “things were getting a lot more consistent with communication and seeing each other”, but then something changed again: “it felt like she was starting to distance” herself from you, “It was nothing major”.

You emailed her, asking her: is everything okay? You expected her to tell you about her business, kids, but “that’s not what I got”, you wrote- angry that she didn’t answer your question the way you expected her to answer it. Instead of sharing about her life (that which you expected), she told you that “she was tired of chasing friends around and people not being responsive to her texts. She mentioned there was someone in particular that she was really unhappy with but didn’t want to get into it”, and that “she needed space from everyone”, not indicating that you are not one of the “everyone”.

“It felt like she just wanted to push us back to being super casual friends like we had been before and she thought I wouldn’t notice”, you wrote angrily, suggesting she was trying to trick you back into a casual friendship.

“Keep in mind this was a woman who literally could not go more than a few days without texting or calling me for over a year. A woman who would go on social media if I didn’t respond to a text, or voicemail, fast enough and comment on one of my posts making it clear she wanted me to reach out. A woman who had told me she had not had a friend who was as expressive, and supportive”- angry at that woman who did you wrong.

Anger continues: “but now I was in a ‘pile’ of people she needed space from- it didn’t really add up.. I just didn’t ‘buy’ what she had said in her email”- you are angry at a woman who used to want you, but no longer wants you, having dumped you in a pile of  ****, so to speak.

Angry for so long, you want her still, and you are thinking about sending her a casual text so to reconnect, but you know that if you don’t get a response, you will get angrier than you are already (“I know if I don’t get a response, I will be even more irritated”).

After she dumped you in that pile, you sent her a “freak out” message: overly-emotional, angry, desperately not wanting to lose her, and her response was that although “she had not reconciled with her husband and nothing has changed”, she “didn’t want to “tick my wife off and wanted to go back to being casual, and relaxed, friends again”.

Once again, her response was not what you expected or wanted: you did not want to be casual friends with her, you wanted closer and getting-closer relationship. So, you rejected what she told you, suggesting that she did not tell you what was really happening (“her avoiding telling me what was really up”).

More anger on your part, and she “asked for a break”, and the break is four months old at this point. You figure that she is keeping her distance from you because she is “clearly has some major intimacy issues when it comes to getting close to people.. her behavior was so all over the place”- her intimacy issues, her emotional instability issues.

You feel that what you gave her a lot, that you invested in her a lot giving her emotional support, validation, encouragement and saying nice things to her,  and you feel cheated for not getting a good return on your investment: “she liked the emotional support, validation and encouragement… she probably liked all of the nice things I said to her... she finds me attractive so getting all this attention from me probably felt nice”.

You suspect her of dishonesty, of devising a plan: “I thought her ‘plan’ may have been to try and downgrade our friendship back to it’s prior casual level and maybe at some point she would have let it drop”. But you interrupted her plan, and she broke up with you sooner than she planned: “when I picked up on something being amiss it gave her ‘permission’ to ask for a full on ‘break'”.

“she perhaps didn’t know what the heck she wanted… I truly just want her friendship back in my life.. to get her to just communicate with me like an emotionally intelligent adult.. I truly feel like she has made whatever is going on with her a much bigger deal than it needs to be because she thinks I am going  to have some crazy reaction… she is the one who really made stuff ‘weird’ the whole time… I have never felt it was that big of a deal if there were underlying feelings in a platonic friendship and that it’s just kind of a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ situation, but for some reason I think she just got too heady about it which kind of made everything get weird and come to the surface”-

– the rest of my post will be my commentary on the quote above, the last of your share:

“she.. didn’t know what the heck she wanted”- Let’s look at what you wanted from B, from one point on: you wanted a “don’t ask don’t tell” close and getting-closer relationship with her, a relationship that will appear casual to others.. and to yourselves.

You wanted a relationship where she will answer your questions the way you think she should.

When she no longer needed you- you got angry, blaming her for not being emotionally intelligent, for not behaving like an adult (“to get her to.. like an emotionally intelligent adult”), for “making stuff ‘weird’ the whole time”, for “getting too heady”, and mostly for making “everything get weird and come to the surface”-

– You didn’t want the weirdness to come to the surface, you wanted it hidden in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationship. The Weirdness, as I see it, is not that you are an emotional man who needs a woman’s love; the weirdness is in your expectations of what a love relationship should be. What you expected in regard to a relationship with B is not sustainable:

* When you ask a woman a question, you need to be open to her answering your question her way, instead of expecting a particular answer and then getting angry that she didn’t answer your question your way.

* When you called the relationship with her a “platonic friendship”, you apply the “don’t ask, don’t tell” principle to you and you, meaning, you don’t ask yourself (ex., is this a friendship or something else?), and you don’t tell yourself (ex., I am physically attracted to her, I want her physically!).

You apply this principle to you-and-you, and to you and her. You can’t have an intimate, getting-closer relationship with this principle at its center.

This don’t-ask-don’t-tell principle does not change the reality that you don’t want to “come to the surface”. That reality exists nonetheless, and it will not be hidden just because you want it hidden.

* You are too angry with her. From one point on, you freaked out, got to be too emotional, this is why she wanted you relaxed (“wanted to go back to being casual, and relaxed, friends again”). The weirdness is that you don’t seem to be aware of how emotional you are, denying your own emotions and blaming her for the fact that the emotions you deny come to the surface from time to time, more frequently since B broke up with you.

anita

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

Dear Timepassages2070:

“I was one of the first people she chose to tell about divorcing her husband… she flat out told me I was one of the only male friends she had told about her situation… she made a point several times over the course of the past year of letting me know how close she had come to consider me.. she had flat out told me I was one of the top people on her ‘list’… She had also made it pretty clear to me that getting close to people, and opening up, was something she really struggled with… she literally called me afterwards to tell me how much she appreciated me… and multiple times she said she never had a friend like me… she had wanted me to do a private yoga session at the house of.. female friend… because she probably wasn’t totally okay with me doing this session alone”.

This is what I see here regarding you: you have a deep desire to be someone’s first, someone’s # 1, a desire that has been there likely since childhood-  an unfulfilled desire to be noticed, to be appreciated, to be important, to be chosen over others, to be values, to be Special in a parent’s mind and heart. Your anger at this woman is the same anger you had decades ago, anger for having been rejected or neglected (not noticed, not appreciated, etc.) by a parent.

Your interest in this woman has been primarily emotional, not sexual.

When you felt that she had You in her mind and heart as Special, you were thrilled, and you were and still are invested in interpreting her words and behaviors to mean that you are indeed special to her. When she took that Special away from you, you were and are devastated. And angry.

This is what I see regarding her: she told you that “she could never imagine dating, or trusting, anyone again but she is a human being and human beings have needs“. You interpreted that to mean that she used you and other men to “get some of those ‘emotional needs‘ met until her and her husband ultimately separate”.

But she may have referred to her sexual needs, not emotional needs otherwise. I don’t think that the other men in her life, the men you mentioned, are likely to have had the emotional needs that you have for this woman. Likely, they were interested in her sexually. It may be that she has had a series of sexual affairs with other men while married.

Therefore, I don’t think that “the situation she is currently in is perhaps causing her to cross, and perhaps, push boundaries in her friendships with men”- I think that her friendship with you really was special/ unique,  just like she told you (“multiple times she said she never had a friend like me”). Other men were interested in her sexually, you were interested in her otherwise; with other men she had sexual affairs, with you- she had a friendship… until that friendship became to stressful for her, and she ended it.

anita