I ask this question because over the course of my 35 years I have noticed a common thread.
Situation 1: I’m married… My wife gets pregnant by someone else. She then talks me into not divorcing her, then does it again. In the process of the divorce she tells me that she “wants to stay friends”.
Situation 2: My divorce is behind me. I’m seeing someone new. I find out that her divorce wasn’t really official just yet, and that all of a sudden she is moving back in with her hubby. She “wants to stay friends”.
Situation 3: I’m seeing someone else. Things look pretty good. We get along well. Work, though, causes me to move three and a half hours away. She decides that the long distance relationship isn’t for her, but she “wants to stay friends”.
Now… I’m figuring that she’ll either change her mind or I can move back near where she lives or something… So I stay in touch with her… But then she starts telling mew about this new guy she is seeing.
Grand. This is fun. Not only does she break up with me no more than a week before I was actually going to propose to her, but now she feels obligated to tell me about the guy she is now sleeping with.
So I pretty plainly tell her I’m not interested in hearing about her new boy toy, and that if that’s all she ever wants to talk about, she can bloody well talk to someone else. She gets all weepy and tells me that she doesn’t want to lose my friendship.
Note: Women’s tears should officially be classified as a mind control drug.
So I cave in and don’t start blocking her number with my caller ID. But she still talks endlessly about what a great time she has with this other guy.
Then, Friday night she calls me. She tells me that she broke up with so and so and she is mad at him… I notice traffic noise in the background… I ask her if she is in her car and she tells me that she is… I ask her if she is on her way home from so and so’s house… She tells me that she is on her way to spend the night at some other guy’s house.
Now, at this point I figure there are a few distinct and separate possibilities.
A: She is clueless and just doesn’t understand that every time she tells me things like this, it feels like she is pouring a large sized bag of driveway salt into the gaping hole left when she ripped my heart out of my chest cavity. But she is a relatively smart girl, and I don’t believe that is the case.
B: She is simply a sadistic psychotic who enjoys torturing the men in her life at every turn. Although I wouldn’t have believed this at first, her continued insistence to tell me about her sex life leads me to lean on this as the most likely theory.
I simply say “Well, have fun” and I hang up. She called back immediately. I saw her number on the caller ID and I picked up the phone and said only “Don’t call here any more” and hung up again.
Maybe I over reacted. Maybe she was sincere and just wanted to be friends. Or maybe - and I am starting to think this is likely - women are just broken.