Somebody explain this to me, please.
Why would a former romantic interest from ~10 years past, married, with two kids, want to reconnect as friends?
About a decade ago, I had an unfortunate collision with a woman. At the time, she was a student, monogamously dating a fella for 5+ years. She develops the standard Teacher Crush. We keep it ethical, and I keep my guard up. I don’t date current students. In general, I’m severely averse to dating students in general. In general, I’m averse to dating, in general.
With class over, we develop a friendship, which she then pushes into a borderline romantic situation. I’m not innocent in this, but it never actually crosses any real lines, but it does lead her to re-evalute her feelings. She drops the engagement and we agree to date. This lasts for about a pico-second, and she re-engages. And gets married.
This, of course, leads to an ending of the friendship, since now I’m offended, he’s offende, everybodies offended. Sporadically, we attempt the friendship thing. Stupid, I know, and years back, I cut it off decisively: not worth it, not fair to me, not fair to her, not fair to husband. Stoooooooooopid.
Recently, she re-establishes contact. It took me repeated messages to the effect of “this is stupid, we’ve done this before, it’s not fair to me or to your husband, think of your kharma, blah blah blah…” I’ve done enough damage in this life already: repeating stupid mistakes is, well, stupid.
I basically had to block her e-mail. I could easily damage her domestic situation by forwarding the e-mails to her husband (I won’t).
She got what she wanted: family, husband, kids, picket fence. Why is bothering me? Does she really think that an open friendship with me would not yield a few choice, Jerry Springer/Cops type moments? Is his reward for taking her back and being a good father, provider and husband the prospect of her re-befriending the guy she almost wrecked the engagement over?
What perplexes me is why am I more concerned about the husband’s feelings tha she is? Not a good sign, is this; Yoda say would. I don’t get it. I don’t want to get it. I don’t want to dig out decade-old moral failures. I have my first quasi-cyber-stalker. Grrrrrrrrreat.