We broke up with you two years ago, after your hypocrite, racist, misogynist husband insulted me and my loved ones repeatedly and you didn’t bat an eye. It took a while to make it to that level, since I cut him a lot of slack for having Asperger’s and not getting social cues. I stopped returning your calls. We moved across town. Didn’t go to your daughter’s christening. Or your mother-in-law’s birthday party. Or your husband’s graduation party. Avoided you as much as possible at public gatherings, acted cold when we couldn’t. Changed our phone numbers (for an unrelated reason) and didn’t tell you the new ones.
WHY on earth did you last week try to give my insane mother-in-law a guilt trip about how you “haven’t seen me or talked to me in almost a year”? Are you that delusional that you would, one, think I cared what SHE thought, two, think that contacting me thru her was a good plan (thanks for spilling more crazy on me), and three, forget seeing and talking to me at a baby shower in mid-December? Since when is December 2008 almost a year ago?
WHY did you today send me an evite to your daughter’s birthday party? And when I blocked you and removed myself from the invite list, you emailed me to trot out the old “haven’t seen me or talked to me in almost a year” lie? Have you not noticed that I blocked you, your husband, AND your one year old daughter on Facebook? Isn’t one year old too young to have a page? (Hmm, can I report her for a violation of their terms of service?) And you sign your email “Sincerely hoping that you aren’t dead”? This would be funny if we were friends. Which we aren’t.
I’m glad I’ve never had to break up with a guy as clueless as you.
Does the advice for a stalker apply? Don’t engage? Or do I “owe” her, as a friend of some 3 years (before breakup) some sort of explanation or apology? “I’m sorry, I don’t like you anymore”?
“But you can’t possibly hold it against meeeeeeeeee, just because my husband called you a half-breed mongrel lesbian dog rapist, spelled it out on your lawn with gasoline and set it on fire, killed your dog, slashed the tires on your car, told your boss that you were going around saying that he is a chronic masturbator, and told the DEA that you had 60 kilos of cocaine in your garage…can you?”
So you sort of just avoided her? Declining invitations, moving, not giving her your new phone number? She may be under the illusion that you’ve just been too busy to get together. If you need to, spell it out for her.
It seems to me that you got confused. You might have gotten your point across if you had e-mailed this to your former sortafriend instead of posting it here. I really don’t mean that as snarky. This is one of the few situations where politeness won’t do any good.
Chimera: I know, its just some petty insult that got too irritating. Women aren’t as smart as men, biologically (I happen to know that I whupped him on the SAT), a woman’s place is in the home (while his wife works full time and their baby is in daycare b/c he’s getting his 3rd AA), all Catholics worship idols and the pope is an active agent for Satan, etc. Garden variety stupid and offensive.
Ivylass: Yes, but she issues invitations almost monthly, and at first called twice a week. And I moved 18 months ago.
My husband says my choice is simple, and he’s right. Continue to ignore, or be blunt. I am a coward about it, though, because if she comes to her senses in ten years and leaves him, I’d like to be friends again. Her patience seems to be everlasting, though, and she’ll hold my lack against me if I tell her why I can’t be friends. She has drunk the purple flavor-aid.
FYI, Facebook does not notify someone if they’re defriended or blocked. The only way you’d tell is if you manually looked through your friends list and saw someone missing. To the blocked person, you just disappear.
You know, you could tell/write her something along the lines of “I care about you a lot but can no longer be around you and your husband.” Get specific about the insults if needed but that’s how you’ve spelled it out here. Why not use the truth?
She’s trying to mend fences. Find out what she has to say, and if the racist is still in the picture, explain to her why you will not be taking her up on the invitation.
If someone doesn’t return your phone calls, changes their phone numbers and doesn’t give you the new ones, gives you the cold shoulder when you happen to run into them…I can’t think of any clearer way to say that you don’t want to have anything to do with them anymore. But apparently this woman is an idiot.
Maybe send a short e-mail saying that the reason you didn’t return phone calls, changed phone numbers, moved away, and are only icily polite when forced into contact is that you lost interest in being subjected to her husband’s idiotic boorishness, but didn’t see the point in bringing it up.
She knows who he is, and she’s made the choice to live with it, but it doesn’t mean you have to put up with his crap and expose your family to his poison.
But since you have lots of mutual friends there wasn’t much to be gained by a “breakup” talk, since you were friends and now you’re not, which is what happens when adults have interests and lives which diverge. There wasn’t any point in creating some sort of drama out of nothing that would only make everything uncomfortable for your friends, who might feel forced to choose sides when there aren’t any sides to choose because it’s not that big a deal. You just don’t want to hang out with them anymore. He’s an ass, and you’d rather spend time in the company of people you enjoy and respect. And if she ever does leave him, well, that will include her, but until then y’all will just have to agree to disagree.
I guess she needs it spelled out, but I feel for you in that it is only her pushing for some sort of drama or whatever. I guess just stress that you didn’t want to hurt her feelings, you only wanted to be spared any more of her husband’s presence, and figured you’d fade out of their lives gracefully. After all, there must be so many people who find him very charming that their lives and social calendar are so jampacked that you thought you wouldn’t be missed and could leave without fuss. Until she started harassing you through family and e-mail.
(I’ve been where you are. Continuous hangups at 3am, ugh.
“Why won’t you talk to me?!”
“Because you’re drunk, and it’s 3am. And how is this supposed to make me want to be friends?”)
It’s actually pretty common for friends to just “disappear” for a while, especially if you’re not super close. I’ve had people call me out of the blue after 3 months and act perfectly normal. I would then ask “was there something I did or said that offended you in any way”. “Nope, just been really busy”.
So she’s probably thinking it’s something along those lines. Especially since it sounds like you just started avoiding her, rather than spelling out the problem and specifically saying “I don’t like you/your husband/your dog, and don’t want to be friends anymore”.
I’m not sure what “the purple flavor-aid” is, but your husband is right. And I think you owe her some sort of closure or explanation as to why you don’t want to hang out anymore. You don’t have to be mean about it, but you need to have a talk with her and say something like “I’ve been avoiding you because of your husband and his comments, and it got to the point where it’s just too upsetting/uncomfortable to be around him at all”.
But it sounds like you already know what to do, you just need to grit your teeth and do it.
It’s a reference to the cult at Jonestown and their suicide method; these days some people use it to mean that someone bought in so deep to someone else’s beliefs/line of B.S./whatever that you can’t talk any sense into them. In other words, she thinks the wife is so enamored of her husband that any criticism will be rejected outright.
I’m clueless about one thing: You said you couldn’t stand the husband’s insults, so you cut off contact with her, without explictly tellinger her what the problem was, yet you say that you would like to be friends with her again if she ever leaves her husband. Has she ever said that it’s “all or nothing” - either you are friends with her and husband, or neither? Are they siamese twins? Or is it against the social codex to be friends with the woman but not with the husband? If you don’t want to be in his company, you can surely invite her to your home or meet at a third place, saying explictly to come without him.
This also confused me in the book “Christmas strike” I started reading - one of the wifes enjoys going to parties, but her husband detests them, so it’s always a struggle between them. Why in the name of all that’s holy can’t married women go alone to partys and family gatherings, and the men enjoy their quiet? Do your marriage contracts contain a clause that as married couple you have to spend every free minute together?
I responded to her email, “Please stop trying to contact me”.
Despite urgings from my husband to blame it on him (he thought it would be funny for me to say that he would beat me if I talked to her rolleyes :she would take a line like that dead seriously)
I know, kind of a cop out, but it gets her off my back and doesn’t burn any bridges. Thanks for helping me be brave and respond at all
I think responding that way actually burned the bridge. Now she doesn’t know the husband is the problem, and if they do break up, she’ll never call and tell you. I think it would have been better to tell her why and then say, “don’t contact me again, please”
My friend Linda has been dead for nearly 14 years now, but scarcely a month goes by where I don’t wonder what it was I did that ticked her off so badly in college that she stopped talking to me or corresponding beyond Christmas cards and baby announcements. A simple explanation, even if it hurt my feelings and ruined the scrap of a relationship we had left, would have made a huge difference to me. Sometimes I dream that her son might come across an unsent letter to me that will explain it all, and I can be at peace. If I had known she would die so young I would have been brave and sat her down privately and had it out. The not knowing still makes me sad, that I could have done something so bad without knowing it, that hurt a dear friend to the point of her ostracizing me.
Seriously, that was the worst possible reply. Now she will be wondering, with justification, just what it is she did to piss you off.
You said this:
Good bye to that idea. Why, if you are willing to say ‘don’t contact me again’ aren’t you willing to say ‘I will not associate with that asshole of a husband of yours. Let’s have coffee some day, without him.’
If she replies and defends him, then you can tell her she’s drunk the Kool Aid.
I once said to my brother more or less these words: “if you wife says rude things to me and you don’t say anything, then it comes from you too.” Up to that point his wife never missed a chance to let me know why I’m a shitty person, my brother would sit there and say nothing while his wife was openly rude to me. Eventually the camel’s back broke, I snapped and told him that either his wife quit it or he never call me again. This was several years ago, as it stands now I’m not really any closer to my brother (but we do talk), and I have since not heard one snippy comment from my SIL. Win-win, as far as I’m concerned.
So I get where you’re coming from, I really do. If all you want is for this person to disappear then you’ve accomplished that. If you wanted some sort of apology or at least recognition that yes, her husband was rude to you, then you haven’t accomplished that. If you wanted to see this person go to bat and get her husband to at least keep his mouth shut while you are in the room, I think that is possible. It worked for me.
