tl;dr: My GF continues to talk to a guy that makes romantic advances on her. Her excuse is that she feels too bad to cut him out of her life completely.
My girlfriend use to be friends with this guy, we will call him Bob, for a long time. They grew to be very close. Bob confessed his feelings to my girlfriend before me and her started dating, and she turned him down but decided to remain his friend.
Bob would continue making romantic remarks towards her. He told her that if both of them were still single at the age of 30, they should get married. He would make all kinds of remarks about how beautiful she is. On one occasion, my girlfriend asked him why he didn’t just try talking to other girls, and he responded by saying that the only girls he would ever want in his life would be her and his own mother.
Now, when I became official with her, I told her that I had a problem with her having conversations with a guy that clearly was romantically obsessed with her. To her credit, she agreed and told me that she wouldn’t call him or text him anymore. She also made it clear to him that she now had a boyfriend that she was seriously committed to.
However, the other week she told me that Bob contacted her and one of their mutual friends about needing help preparing for a job interview. My girlfriend and her friend hopped on a zoom call with Bob and helped him with preparing for it. Then, my girlfriend’s friend had to leave the zoom call early, so my girlfriend and him talked on the zoom call alone for about 20 minutes afterwards, just catching up on life. To her credit, my girlfriend didn’t try to hide any of this from me and told me about it afterwards.
However, this whole situation just rubbed me the wrong way.
I felt like she went back on her promise about not talking to this guy. Her excuse was that she was just trying to be nice and that she feels bad for this guy, as he is is already down in life and suffers from depression. My girlfriend is a very nice person that really cares about others, so while I do believe her about her intentions, it still is clear that she went back on her word to me.
Then, a few days after that zoom call, Bob sent my girlfriend a song that he wanted her to listen to. The lyrics are about how badly a guy likes a girl and how much he misses her and how much he wants to touch her. My girlfriend told me that she knows that Bob sent her the song because it’s how he feels about her.
This set me off.
I told her that I wasn’t dealing with her talking to a guy that views her this way anymore, and that I wanted her to cut him out completely. She said that she was fine not speaking to him anymore, but she specifically said that if he texted her “happy birthday” on her birthday or on similar occasions that she wants to be civil and respond back.
This really made me angry, as I don’t think she should be responding to ANY of this guys messages, no matter how impersonal they are, especially because she already went back on her word about not talking to him at all. Again, her excuse for wanting to make this exception is because she’s a nice person and would feel bad about not responding.
She’s also still in an iMessage group chat with him and mutual friends. She asked me “What if I don’t respond to him if he messages me personally, but I still continue to interact with him in the group chat?” She seems to think that talking to this guy personally vs in a group chat somehow makes a difference.
My question is if I am being too controlling. It’s the last thing I want to do, but this whole situation just makes me feel sick.
5 comments
I would have an issue with you being too controlling, but I also have an issue with her enabling this guy’s suffering. She isn’t being nice to him. She is hurting him, over and over again. He needs no contact from her to get over her. And every time she gives him this little drabs of niceness, she is prolonging his pain and suffering and making him take way longer to get over her. She clearly has no interest in him, so he isn’t a threat to your relationship. But she really should stop putting him through this, even if she is not ethically truly responsible, because he is doing it to himself. But still, when you see somebody using you to self-harm, you do not play along and let them continue.
Tell her that his is a deal breaker for you, Then depending on what happens, take whatever action you feel necessary.
Bob is being inappropriate and actively undermining your relationship with you girlfriend. It seems like you’ve already cut her a lot of slack. Imagine if the roles were reversed and see how that feels to you.
She likes the attention. If this really bothered her, she would shut this guy down. She doesn’t.
People should only flirt with their partner when they are in a relationship.
She may view you as a back up until someone better comes along.
No. You set the boundaries and if she breaks them you leave.