The gods are smiling today. Polly has gotten one right.
The case at hand concerns an insecure woman. She has made a new female friend who likes to poach other women’s
men. In the case at hand, any time the letter writer, Feeling a Bit Single-White-Femaled,
expresses any interest in a
man, her sometime friend immediately makes a play for said man. It feels too
appalling to be real, a sign of clear disloyalty, a willingness to play out a
rather nasty psychodrama at someone else’s expense.
FABSWF writes this about her
friend:
But
then, over time, I noticed she would contact any man I paid any attention to.
If I said someone was attractive, by the end of the night she would have
friended that man on Facebook and started to send him messages. If I mentioned
a man from my past — who didn’t even live in the state — she would do the same.
She befriended all the men that I dated. And then, recently, the tool bag of a
human who publicly made me feel shitty started seeing her, in a sneaky but also
super-obvious way. I should mention that for the past year I have been in a
relationship with a lovely, wonderful man who is amazing and I have no interest
in the tool-bag human AT ALL. But still it all makes me feel gross. It’s as
though she’s taking over parts of my life (I’m not kidding when I say she has
found a way to be romantically involved with at least six to eight men I’ve
been involved with or mentioned since I’ve met her). But this current one feels
worse. And to top it off, she keeps inviting me places they’ll both be, so I’m
constantly preparing for the moment she springs their relationship on me with an
audience around.
Long
question short: All of this makes me angry and frustrated and mad and filled
with a shitty hate feeling and I don’t know how to get over it. My life is
great, why should I care? My ego however seems to feel otherwise.
You already know the answer to the question: get rid of this
woman. That is Polly’s advice, and it is the right advice. Do not pass Go. Do
not collect $100. Just ghost the witch.
She is not your friend. She is exploiting and abusing you in
order to make herself feel more attractive.
Funny thing, this non-friend has defined her dating life in
terms of FABSWF’s express preferences and interests. Now, if FABSWF were not as
nice a person as I suspect she is, she might use this fact to express interest
in someone who is decidedly unattractive or who is not going to treat her well
or who does not exist. She might even set up a fake Facebook account for this non-existent man.
Then everyone can sit back and watch the snipe hunt.
Your last para is exactly what I was thinking after Dump That Traitorist "Friend". Talk about your "Evil Woman"!
ReplyDeleteOkay, now I want to learn how to do things " in a sneaky but also super-obvious way."
ReplyDeleteIs there a "how-to" book on the subject?
Polly said: "Run way from this scary motherfucker right now and never look back! Explain or don’t explain; it makes no fucking difference. If you start blowing her off and she tells you that makes you a bad person (expect it!), don’t pay a bit of attention. This woman wants to get under your skin. It’s her thing. She’s dangerous. Keep her far away from you."
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't seem that easy to me. The advice is too dramatic, as if ending a friendship by being passive-aggressive is simple or good. And an open question is how to confront the newly exfriend person about the decision, especially if she's still going to be around the same social circles.
Maybe things are that simple as Polly offered in her hysteria - identify a crime or pattern of scary behavior, convict the criminal in your mind on past behavior, and put up a wall of animosity out of no where, explain nothing, and wait for the scary friend to get the nonmessage message.
And there's still a question of what message to give to common friends, when they ask what's up. And drastic behavior makes you look like the paranoid person, especially if you defend it with exaggerations they may know are not fully accurate, unlike Polly whom is forced to hear only one side.
But like the title is "Friend Keeps Dating My Exes," while most of her open discussion was about men she was "newly interested in" so that seems contradictory. Why mix these two as one except insecurity to defend a pattern of behavior.
And if confronted, this friend might deny "at least six to eight men I’ve been involved with or mentioned since I’ve met her", and say she was just innocently flirting with 5 of them, and knew the 6th was an ex, so okay? Can this woman handle contradiction to her mental narrative? Polly clearly can't handle that with such firm advice.
Women's friendships always seem more complicated than men's and undeclared "competition" can seem very real, with few skills to detail with it. I recall in my 20s one women told me she dated a man in collge, and then stopped, and her friend started dating him, and later he asked her out again, and she said yes, and lost her friend over that. Insecurity is ugly and trying to be loyal, doubly-so.
Perhaps Comey's approach is the correct one, when dealing with confusing loyalty. Document private conversations and then when someone plays "You betrayed me!" games you have evidence, at least for your own sanity, in the chronological order of words and actions.
The whole thing is ugly because humans have such poor ability to remember exact events, and prefer to rewrite events in imagined "patterns" later that don't always honestly represent what really happened.
Maybe Stuart's joke advice is helpful (express interest in someone who is decidedly unattractive or who is not going to treat her well), or just any random man, and such a test is in order to see what happens. Maybe it really is a psychological problem? But I won't judge from this evidence so far.