I Pit Human Female Boomerangs

The BBQ Pit
1

I tried this thread in MPIMS, to little effect. Then it struck me: this should be a pit thread.

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.

**I pit this boomerang of a female for thoughtlessly winging her way back my way, long after the fact, when no good can come of it.
**

*Why is it that people do this? Why look up people from your past, just because you’re squicked out over something? WHy squick everybody else out, too? I don’t need to be reminded of past things, I like them mouldering in the past, where they belong.
*

2

Why do people do this? Every few months I’ll get an IM or email out of the blue from some past flame. I just figured that once they’ve had me, they’re addicted. They’re Rebeccaholics. I’ve learned to just say no. No good can come of it.

3

Thank Og for SPAM filters…

4

I was single for a long time, it took 2 years of being married for the phone calls to stop.

5

Oh, and let’s not just pit female boomerangs, but boomerangs in general. Guys do it, too.

6

YEAH THEY DO. Srsly.

7

Well…you sound like a nice, reasonable person, with a healthy amount of empathy for her husband. And she sounds like she’s getting bored with her life and would like some drama and puffing up by a “potentially attracted” friend at best, some nasty talk show style milf action at worst. But that’s just the way I’m seeing what’s written here. I’d stay out of it too.

8

That was my take on it, too. Funny thing is, I could forward the e-mails to her husband, then it would get all medieval/Jerry Springer-esque. But it’s not worth the drama/kharma/spit/bandwidth, so to Hell with it.

Like the old monk from the “muddy river” koan, I’ll just put the woman down at the creek bed, and move on…if she’ll let me. I may have to dump her back in the river, wedding or not.

We’ll see if she stays away in RL. “Bored” housewives are capable of mischief if they have the degrees of freedom. :dubious: Deny them the room, and they can’t do anything. I just don’t need any on-campus drama. Hopefully, with two kids in school and her own classes to teach, she’ll lack the energy to follow-up. Maybe she’ll even put some energy into the husband.

And if I need to do it, I’ll just forward those delightful e-mails. For now, though, I’ll just “forget” that she attempted contact.

It’s just sooooooooo narcissistic to dig up the past that way., male, female or otherwise. Hell, in ye olde Victorian tumes, she would have sucked it up and put it all in all anguish-ey filled journal. But with the age of e-mail, the internet and the lack of personal introspection, it is easy just to post now and think later.

Like I said earlier, SPAM filters. I can even “ban” her address so that I never see it. But I do want some sort an advanced early warning system.

9

I’m not averse to contacts from the past per se. How the romance (or potential romance) ended, and how the other person behaved, matters a great deal. I also agree with you about the folks who call because they’re squicked.

10

It’s also about current circumstances, and whether a current interaction could work. You’d think that a person who has been sent away for the Nth time would figure it out, but no, they’re like some sort of irregular comet, swooping in dramatically on a sporadic basis.

11

An ex of mine, who is still a good friend, got letters of his ex from years ago that fit the OP’s rant perfectly. At the time, he was in a relationship with me. But she still wrote him letters once a year or so signed “kisses, Susan”. Susan was, as the OP describes, married with kids and her husband was busy with work, and neglected her in terms of romance and sex. However, she knew he was a hard-working cad whne she married him.
What piqued me was that in her letters to my ex (he showed them to me) she always assumed he was still romantically available; she never mentioned me or asked about me; and she assumed tacitly that his relationship with me was as unsatisfactory as her relationship with her husband.

However, both my ex (SO at the time) and I didn’t mind Susan’s using him as an romantic outlet. Susan was still a friend of my ex and he did like to meet her once a year or so, and that was okay with me.
But I couldn’t help making the occasional sarcastic remark about artistic sensitive Susan willfully marrying the good provider, instead of choosing one of the misunderstood artist from among her suitors, though.

12

I get this, too. I used to get it a lot more, but suddenly, as soon as I got engaged, all of the exes who has previously kept me stubbornly on their MSN lists despite my long-term blocking and deleting of them finally deleted me.

Clearly they weren’t trying to be “just friends”.

13

I have been single for a bit over a year after a twelve year marriage. I have been doing a fair amount of dating since then. One of my “one night stands” continues to hound me. Another woman with whom I had a few week relationship which I ended when I realized that she was cheating on her SO with me also continues to contact me every three or four weeks.

So what you are telling me is that this is going to go on for <i>years</i>. Wow.

14

I’ll confess that when I’m bored with my life, I tend to romanticize the past. Sometimes I’ll delude myself into thinking that if I had just done the right thing with the one guy, things would have turned out a lot better.

But I don’t kid myself that this is really the case. It’s just daydreaming. And I certainly wouldn’t look up old flames with any ideas of reconnecting.

I had one ex-boyfriend tell me that he really needed me to be a friend, because breaking up with me was the biggest mistake of his life. Funny, 'cause I told him that when he dumped me. We didn’t reconnect.

15

Generally speaking, of course. :smiley:

16

It’s difficult.

I used to be right into the internet chat scene, until I discovered message boards, which I prefer.

I used to be on Yahoo and ICQ every day in the old days, and I had a coupole of online romances. Then I had a decidely offline relationship for five years, which ended a year ago.

During the five years of committed relationship, one of my few forays back into Yahoo chat resulted in my striking up a friendship with a Vietnamese woman in Hong Kong - she;s in a refugee hostel there - yes, I think it’s dangerous too. We had a kind of cerebral friendship, but I never hid the fact that I was unavailable, and neither of us made any moves, yet the sexual tension was palpable.

So my five-year relationship ends, and I “go underground” for twelve months. No dating, no contact with past flames, no internet chat. The other day, I fired up Yahoo for the first time, and there are messages form this girl in Hong Kong. They are months old. She is worried and hurt, and of course I feel guilty, so I reply, offer humble apologies, and make it clear I’d like to recommence the friendship.

Now, she hasn’t replied yet (it’s only been a day or so), and I’m not silly about her situation. I’m not prepared to do the “green card” thing for her (can’t afford it anyway). Now I’m single, the whole dynamics have changed though. I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing.

17

Quit yer whinin’. I’d been going on happily about my life for thirty-seven fucking years when I got an email out of the blue from this psycho bitch I went out with in college. One of the best days of my life was when I finally came to my senses and got free of this loony. Then she finds me on the Internet and tries to re-establish contact, and I can tell from the text of the email that she’s still up to her old mind games. God, what a cunt. Needless to say, I didn’t bother answering. Got one more email and then she quit. I would not put it past her to show up at my door wanting to ‘apologize’ for the way she treated me all those years ago.

On another front, it took three or four years and my intervention to get rid of a dickhead that was obsessed with my daughter. I finally told the guy’s wife about it, which did the trick. I’m sure she was less than pleased to find out that the cute name he had picked for their daughter was the same as MY daughter’s. Cripes, what a bunch of weirdos on this planet.

18

:rolleyes: The point of a pit thread, unless you haven’t noticed, is to pit an offending party. :rolleyes: :dubious:

But she appears to have gotten the point. Of course I’ve added her to my blocked/SPAM kist, so I shan’t be bothered by her e-mails again. She’ll have to find new ways to harass me in the future, when she goes into bored cul-de-sac/desperate housewife/riled-up-by-her-idiot friends mode.

Though a 37-year past prodigal stalker is remarkable indeed. One must indeed be at least impressed by the required stamina. You show remarkable restraint in your daughter’s case. I suppose that if you could access the cretin in RL you’d give him a more urgent send off.

19

Wow…I feel this thread.

An old girlfriend that broke it off with me has reestablished contact. We broke up in 1990! I’ve been married for nearly 13 years now. I had no problems in maintaining a friendship, but at times she pushes the boundaries. Every time I have to rebuff her and then she acts all hurt. But I want to yell ay her “Listen, I’ve been married for more than 10 years…do you think that I would be married that long if I didn’t love my wife? Its been more than a decade! Find someone else!”.

As much as I hate to say this, I could not have been THAT good.

20

OTOH, maybe everyone for her since then has been THAT bad. :wink: