I’m here to solicit honest Doper opinions. Here’s the scenario:
There’s this woman I dated for about a year and a half. Let’s call her Maya. There’s this guy I’ve known for about nine years, ostensibly a friend, whom we’ll call Steve. I’ve been wary of my friendship with Steve for many reasons: he rarely comes across as truly sincere. Essentially, he’ll pretend to be a friend, going through all the motions, but when the time comes to show true friendship, he doesn’t follow through. He’s not a friend in the sense that he could be trusted to watch your back if it were inconvenient for him to do so.
So Maya dumped me in January, but did it in a reasonably nice way, considering, and said she really thought that we could be friends after some time passed, etc. I agreed, although I had not wanted to give up at the tiome. Nevertheless, I accepted the breakup, and looked forward to recovering a friendship.
Assume that there are good reasons (some professional) for Maya and myself to be friends. The relationship had its problems, and I certainly blew it on several occasions (as did she), but we both agreed that there was more than enough good to justify staying on friendly terms.
Time passes. Sometime about a month later, maybe late February, I decide it’s worthwhile to get in touch and see how things stand (regarding being friends, no more). I try to call her, leave a couple messages, send an email, nothing. Several weeks go by (it’s now late March), I send another email, to which she finally responds, now saying that the friendship is impossible and that she is seeing someone new. She did not disclose who that person was. Note that she also does not say she needs more time or anything like that. I tell her that’s fine; I’m ok with her seeing someone new, but I hope she’ll change her mind so we can be in touch again someday.
More time passes. I send her email off and on, to which she occasionally responds, but only very evasively. There’s at least one email in which she blasts me to smithereens for all the things I did (or that she thought I did) poorly in the relationship. She didn’t want to talk it over, though: it was basically a drive-by shooting. I responded with a quite sincere mea culpa, and suggested that we discuss it, but she did not respond. In the meantime, I’ve been in touch with Steve a number of times, under both friendly and professional circumstances.
Two days ago–this after some more weeks have passed–I recieve an email from her telling me that person she is presently dating is none other than my erstwhile pseudo-friend Steve. Incidentally, the timing sucks: a friend of mine is graduating this weekend with his PhD, and I was going to attend and so was Steve. There’s inadequate time for me to process what has happend. Luckily, my graduating friend (call him “Bob”) has asked Steve not to go. So that is a relief. Nonetheless, I’ve had a pretty rough past few days.
Here’s the question. I personally would never dream of dating a friend’s ex–assuming that friend was someone I cared about at all and that the friendship was one I wanted to keep–especially without engaging in much dialogue and processing with the friend. What do you all think of this?
Additional factors: it was reported to me by reliable sources that, during a time of trouble late last year between Maya and myself, Steve told Maya a number of inappropriate things that seemed to be designed to undermine the relationship, and which were also quite derogatory toward me. In addition, at the time he had started dating another mutual friend (of all of us); call her Joan. He often treated her with insensitivity and indifference in public, and furthermore at social events would flirt and generally show inappropriate attention toward Maya whilst more or less ignoring Joan. He soon dumped her, but in doing so actually told her nothing. He just stopped talking to her and stopped responding to phone calls. She was badly hurt, and Maya witnessed all of it. At the time, Maya was much closer friends with Joan than Steve. If Steve has a guilty conscious over this, none have witnessed it.
So I think it’s clear that Steve isn’t a wonderful person, and Maya isn’t a lot better.
But what do you all think: if you date a friend’s ex, is it reasonable to expect being straight and open with the friend? Is it a dubious proposition to date a friend’s ex at all?
If your ex suggests upon breakup–with apparent sincerity–that she wishes to be on friendly terms at some point, is it reasonable to expect her to be honest and up front about things like this?
I’m pretty upset about it all. If Steve had come to me to talk it over, it might have been ok. Maya and I were both moving on. At this point, though, I want nothing more to do with either of them.
My god, I swear my life is like a f*ing soap opera.
