Ex Friendship conflict, am I being reasonable

[innereast98]

I'm 27M and have been in a relationship with my girlfriend (23F) for around several months. I'm trying to understand a recurring conflict between us and, more importantly, understand my own role in it.

 

Before we got together, my girlfriend had a brief romantic/sexual relationship with a man I'll call Will (35M). They slept together twice and remained friends afterwards. She has always described the relationship as completely platonic now and said they aren't particularly close.

 

I was initially anxious about their history, but I accepted the friendship because I trusted her.

 

The problem began when I met him.

 

The first time we met, I wasn't actually introduced to him. When he noticed me, he immediately made a joke about my fashion, saying something along the lines of, "Is this who you're dating? I thought you'd be with someone with better fashion taste." There were several jokes back and forth about my appearance, followed by a joke about marrying my girlfriend. I laughed along because I was anxious, trying to make a good impression and didn't want to create conflict.

 

Afterwards my girlfriend said something like, "Sorry, he's just like that. You know you can talk back to him."

 

At a second meeting, he made another joke about me getting my girlfriend coffee because "isn't that what they're good for?" Again, I didn't respond. I felt uncomfortable and froze rather than standing up for myself.

 

At the time I didn't make a major issue of any of this. It was only later that I realised how much it had affected me. A significant part of the hurt wasn't just what Will had said, but that I felt my girlfriend hadn't really defended me or recognised how inappropriate I experienced it as being.

 

When I raised it with her, she said Will didn't mean anything by it and that he is abrasive with everyone. She did acknowledge that some of the comments were "a bit dumb."

 

I was still willing to tolerate the friendship.

 

The third time we interacted was at a nightclub. Will approached my girlfriend and me and took her camera, taking a close selfie with her while I was standing there. I interpreted this as another example of him pushing boundaries.

 

I became angry and told my girlfriend that I felt he was deliberately doing things that made me uncomfortable. She disagreed and said she didn't think he meant it that way.

 

About 5–10 minutes later, while I was quite emotionally activated, I went up to Will and said, "We have a problem, you and I."

 

He initially denied there was a problem. I told him that I had an issue with his behaviour and that if he played nice, I'd play nice. I walked away, then returned because I wanted to explain what I was actually upset about.

 

During the confrontation he said:

 

"I nearly headbutted you when you came up to me like that."

 

I told him that I had felt like headbutting him when he had made the earlier comments. He then said, "Sorry, I didn't mean to, that's just my sense of humour."

 

He also said, "You nearly started a fight, mate. You need to be careful."

 

I responded aggressively as well and said, "I wish you'd started a fight, mate. I don't give a s***."

 

The confrontation ended there.

 

I recognise that my behaviour was inappropriate. I approached him aggressively, escalated the interaction and said things I shouldn't have said. I don't think my anxiety or hurt excuses that.

 

However, I also felt genuinely humiliated and unsupported by what had happened beforehand.

 

Afterwards, my girlfriend was reasonably upset with me about the confrontation. I tried repeatedly to explain that what had happened with Will had affected me and that I needed her to understand why I had eventually become so reactive.

 

This has developed into a very intense pursue/withdraw pattern.

 

I repeatedly seek acknowledgement, validation and repair because I still don't feel that the underlying situation has been properly resolved. My girlfriend increasingly feels pressured by these conversations and withdraws or becomes defensive.

 

At one point she asked if she could attend a gig Will had invited her to. I told her I wasn't comfortable with this given what had happened. She initially argued against me but eventually agreed not to go.

 

I then said that perhaps I could become comfortable with their friendship returning to normal if Will repaired things with me in some way. She agreed at the time.

 

Several months have now passed and Will has never contacted me about what happened.

 

My girlfriend now wants to resume the friendship. She believes it isn't fair for the friendship to remain restricted indefinitely and says she doesn't think Will owes me an apology because we aren't friends.

 

Her position is that if she talks to him about the situation and he demonstrates that he understands her perspective, that is sufficient. She wants to resume occasional texting and socialising with him.

 

I still feel that because the conflict was directly between Will and me, and because he made the headbutt comment and never subsequently acknowledged the broader situation, some form of repair from him would be reasonable.

 

But I'm increasingly questioning myself.

 

I have an anxious attachment style and I know that I can become preoccupied with relationship problems and seek reassurance repeatedly. I also know that repeatedly pursuing acknowledgement from my girlfriend has made things worse between us.

 

So I'm struggling to distinguish between two possibilities:

 

1. I have a legitimate relational need for my partner to recognise that someone who treated me poorly should make some effort to repair the relationship, and our disagreement represents a genuine difference in values around loyalty and interpersonal boundaries.

 

2. My attachment anxiety has turned an unpleasant but ultimately relatively minor interpersonal conflict into something much larger, and I'm repeatedly seeking acknowledgement because I'm trying to regulate my anxiety rather than because there is something that objectively still needs to be resolved.

 

What makes this especially difficult is that I don't actually want to control who my girlfriend is friends with. I don't want to dictate that she cannot speak to Will. But I also don't think I can simply force myself to be comfortable with a relationship dynamic that feels fundamentally wrong to me.

 

I'm trying to work out what a psychologically healthy response would look like.

 

My main questions are:

 

- How can I distinguish a legitimate need for repair from reassurance-seeking driven by anxious attachment?

- Is it reasonable to expect my partner to take my side or set stronger boundaries when someone has behaved disrespectfully toward me?

- Can two people have fundamentally different ideas about what "repair" means without either person necessarily being unreasonable?

- At what point does repeatedly seeking acknowledgement become counterproductive or emotionally coercive?

- How do I take responsibility for my aggressive confrontation without invalidating the fact that I felt genuinely hurt beforehand?

- If my girlfriend and I fundamentally disagree about how we handle friendships with former romantic partners and interpersonal disrespect, is that best understood as a compatibility issue rather than something one of us needs to "win"?

 

I'm less interested in being told who is the villain here and more interested in understanding the psychological dynamics and what a healthier response would look like from my side.

[Acacia98]

Your girlfriend's friend is someone who apparently gets a kick out of putting people (including you) down.  I don't know any emotionally healthy person who would gravitate towards friendship with that kind of person. And I definitely don't know any emotionally healthy person who would deliberately expose their significant other to a friend who routinely acted that way. 

To help you figure out whether this is an incompatibility issue, I would ask you a bunch of questions to determine whether you would do the same things your girlfriend was doing. Would you continue socializing with someone you'd slept with? If that person routinely insulted others and pretended that was her sense of humor, would you simply smile and carry on, or would you call her out? Also, if she directed her unkindness at your girlfriend, how would you react? Would you expect your girlfriend to stand up for herself and then get upset when she didn't do it the "right" way?