Sraighii Posted April 11, 2011 Posted April 11, 2011 Hi there all, long time lurker, first time poster. I'm here, obviously, because I have a situation that I think I need some outside help to make a decision on. I feel like I'm at a crossroads, and that I need some kind of neutral party to weigh the pros and cons, because my own head and people directly involved in the situation are too invested to look at it plainly anymore. I apologize that this will be a very long and involved story, but everything needs to be told to get a feel for what kind of situation I'm in with my friend. I should preface this story with the fact that I am exceedingly private, and that trust is the highest compliment I feel I can pay to a person. Keep in mind that this will come back to bite me in the ass. I moved to a new city and started working at my current job a little over a year and a half ago. I met the friend in question at this job, and while we had a good time together at work we never hung out outside. I think we would have eventually under any circumstance because we got along well, but about two months after I started there her fiance committed suicide. Understandably she dropped away from everything for about two months, and as I didn't have her phone number or any way to contact her at the time, we didn't speak though I would have liked to. Eventually she came back to work, and we grew close due to my previous experience of losing a loved one to suicide - though she didn't know it at the time - and my treating her normally as a result. We became close friends over the course of the rest of the year, and I never pushed or expected her to be better in any way, I simply listened to what she had to say, and for a while she did seem to be getting more comfortable with the idea of a life without her fiance. A few months after she came back to work, she changed positions in the office, and started a position that she has never particularly liked. In the course of this job, she came into contact with various third party companies that we contract jobs out to, and in the process met a man who we will call James that owns one of our contractor companies. James was interested in her from the get go, and made his position very plain as such. She and he spoke very often in the course of her work, and they shared a certain amount of information with one another. He was told of her situation with her fiance, and told her on more than one occasion that he would wait for her to be ready. In the mean time, he sent her flowers at work on one occasion, and when she responded by telling him that she didn't like the flowers that he had gotten her, she received a second bouquet - of a different type. Both of these were sent anonymously, and no one at our office knows who sent them outside of her and me. She would always maintain that James was "just a nice guy" and that they were strictly friends, but it was clear to me from the get go that his actions were not meant in a platonic setting. So, while I was happy that she was comfortable hanging out with a guy again, I was also wary of his actions. She and I were going on a vacation together with my sister and one of her friends, and he offered to drive us all to the airport for a flight that left at four in the morning. She maintained it was because he was just nice, but though I didn't voice my opinion, I believed otherwise. Maybe just for her, sure, but all of us whom he has never met was a bit outside of "just a nice guy". When she was looking at a remote car starter, he booked her an appointment at a place that he frequents (he's a car guy, apparently) under his name, and other such things. She would always say he was just a nice guy, but his actions always struck me as otherwise. Prior to her starting her position and beginning to talk to James on a regular basis, she was beginning to open up about her fiance and her feelings, and starting to be a little more comfortable with the idea of going out of her apartment from time to time. While she didn't have many people she liked going out with, she did keep in semi-regular contact with a core of people, and she and I talked to each other daily for a span of about eight months. She's an attractive girl, and she did receive a lot of attention from guys, and she would always get rather upset by it. For a long time she didn't even feel comfortable around friends who were guys who were in relationships, strictly because they were male. But she would usually come to me if she was upset about something, and I'd do my best to listen and try to give her an understanding shoulder about her path. I told her on a lot of occasions that when she found someone to try a relationship with, she would know. Around the time of our vacation, she kept mentioning how she was very confused about what was going on with James, because while she liked him he wasn't the type she usually went for (physically or age wise, he's 9 years older than she is) and she didn't feel ready to move on and start dating. But she also didn't want to ruin this new friendship that she had been building, so she didn't know what to do. Being an outsider and seeing that James was clearly interested in more than just being her friend, I again tried to convey that when she was ready she would know but that she shouldn't try to rush into things. I also began to notice that as she started to talk to James more, she talked to the rest of us less, and became more and more withdrawn. She and I remained close, but more and more of the people she would talk to or hang out with before started to receive excuses, or just stop hearing from her at all. I had vague thoughts of why that was happening then, but between my own problems - that we will come to shortly - and the impending anniversary of her fiance's death on the horizon, I figured that this was just something she was trying to get her head around but that she would come around again shortly. Her fiance's anniversary came, and even at that point she was adamant to me that she was not ready to start dating anyone. At about the same time, I received news that would change my world as well. I have, for a number of years, had indicators of heart problems that I ignored due to youth and ignorance. After we came back from vacation, I went to doctors to get myself looked at, and received results that indicated I was presenting significant symptoms of heart disease that could go badly for me, but that they weren't sure of the cause so they would need to run more tests. Being that I'm 21 and have been fit as a fiddle to this point in my life, this knowledge rocked me in a way I haven't been since my friend's own suicide years ago. After taking some time to take it in, I went to my friend to tell her about it because I felt I could trust her with the information. She was shocked, but took the news rather well, and my only request of her was that she not tell anyone about it. Her first response was "Who would I tell?" and the first name to flash into my head was James, but I cast it aside as utterly impossible due to her knowledge of how private I am, and instead said the name of a fellow co-worker. For the next month or so I was put on a series of medications and through testing that would ultimately not show much, but that's not where the problem is. The problem comes the month after, roughly a month after her fiance's anniversary. And it is here where my trust comes back to bite me in the ass. One day at work I started having significant chest pains that wouldn't go away, and I alerted my boss to this asking to go to the hospital. He asked my friend to drive me, and she took me to the emergency room. Despite my asking her to leave me due to my discomfort with anyone watching what I have to go through, she stayed with me in the waiting room for quite some time. The vast majority of which she was on the phone with James for. Eventually I jokingly asked her to ask him to just drive me back to my car as we weren't getting anywhere, and she told me just to ask him myself. I sent him a text that said as much, and when the phone buzzed in my hand I opened a text that was meant for her, saying "They don't know what causes 25% of heart problems, babe." I was shocked and hurt that she had told him what I had specifically asked her not to, and also that I could see further down in the conversation that they were telling each other how much they loved each other. She had gone from being not ready to date to being madly in love with a guy in less than a month, and had betrayed my trust to him when I don't know anything about him and had never met him. But it gets worse. I finally got her to leave before they started the poking and prodding, but I needed her to give me a ride back to my car as it was still at work. She arrived to pick me up - with James in tow. This was the first time I had ever met him, and it was at the hospital. With the intention of having him drive my car home. At this point I was drugged up rather spectacularly, and really shouldn't have driven Mario Kart let alone my car, but I was so livid I adamantly refused. She dropped me off at my car, and I drove myself home. Between the rage and the drugs I don't remember getting there. She contacted me a few days later - I didn't go into work for obvious reasons - saying that she understood I was upset she told James, but that she hadn't gone into specifics, which I knew to be a lie. I sent her back a text saying that it hurt to know that her need to tell James everything trumped my need for silence, and she promptly exploded on me. We didn't speak for nearly two weeks (I attempted, but she wasn't having it), until I collapsed at work and was taken to the hospital again in an ambulance. She sent me a text afterwards saying that we could talk. We didn't, really. She basically pretended that everything was happy happy joy joy and I went along with it for a few weeks until I simply couldn't anymore. I finally confronted her about it, and basically got told that because it had been so long since it happened we should just forgive and forget and move on. But that isn't how it worked for me. Again, we carried on for a couple of weeks until I got fed up and sent her a letter outlining that I was hurt by the action and that the trust I had in her was broken, but that I wanted to fix it. I mentioned that in spite of everything I wanted to properly meet James, so I could meet the man that had made her so happy (though I still didn't trust him). She never got back to me on that letter. I've never heard a word about it. But we carried on. Every time we go out for dinner with friends, she never mentions James because she doesn't want to tell anyone about him. But when her and I hang out, he's all she talks about and it drives me absolutely loopy. Every time I asked to meet him, she would always say that it simply wasn't time, and it just got me more and more frustrated that he could be inserted into my life and know all my business but I couldn't get the same for him. And it became a fairly common thing for her not to be able to hang out with anyone because her parents or her sister in law were in town, but then I'd hear her bring up something she did with James at the same time. She couldn't come out bowling with us because they were in town (and they were actually there, she wasn't just making that up), but she could go car shopping or to IHOP with James. Last month I finally got fed up again. She asked me about my health, which I now know more details about, but I told her I wasn't comfortable talking about it without meeting James. I also told her that it felt like I was the only one of us trying to fix our friendship, and that she didn't really care at all. I got a "I'm sorry you feel that way, but I don't think you two will like each other because I don't think you're going to accept him and he doesn't respond well to scrutiny. I'm not against our friendship being worked on, but if you can't get over what happened then we can't be friends." I finally got her to agree to trying to meet once a week or so where she doesn't bring up James and my health doesn't come up, and we see where that leads us until she feels comfortable introducing us properly. This past Friday, the first time since that agreement that I've asked her to come out, was my housewarming party for the new apartment I moved into. It was a quiet affair that only had people she knew and got along with, so I asked her to come. She said she was excited for it, and that she would absolutely be there. But, she didn't show. She sent me a text at around 11:30 saying that she had fallen asleep and that she was sorry she couldn't make it. I know that she's tired, and that she's stressed, and that she's got a lot going on in her head. But that one really burned. It's not enough to be blown off for her boyfriend, but now I'm being rejected for a nap. And I know that she's spending at least tonight with James, so she clearly doesn't have a problem venturing out for him. At this point I don't think I would be blamed for saying screw it, but in spite of everything I am still worried for her. At this point, James is by her own admission the only person that she talks to. She is in a relationship with someone who has never wanted anything but that from her in spite of the fact that she is still not over her fiance whether she wants to admit it or not. And I really do believe a big part of the reason she stopped talking to anyone about anything and started isolating herself is because of him. He is at a point in his life where he wants to settle down and have a family, but though she wants a family at some point she doesn't want one now. But I've seen her go from "he's a contractor" to "he's just a guy" to "he's just a nice guy" to "I like him but I don't want to date him" to "I like him but I don't want to marry him" and I'm terrified for her of what the next step is. I think a great deal of this relationship is that he is the only person she talks to, she thinks everyone else thinks she should be moved on, and perhaps most importantly, he has nothing in common with her fiance from what I understand (he is physically at least as far on the other side of the spectrum as you could possibly get). The problem is that no one can call her on it, because no one knows but me. I no longer know what to do. I want to be her friend though she is clearly not interested in being mine. I just want her to be ok through all of this, and I see this ending terribly for her. There are so many red flags that she's given me about him, but I can't do anything anymore. But I'm worried that with the state of our friendship that if I do step back now for my own sanity and health, even if things do go south with them she won't have anyone to go to. She has given up every other relationship she has for this guy. I don't know what to do anymore. And that was incredibly long winded. Opinions on this mess?
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