Friend's ex

LegacyUser

Hi,
So, basically to try and condense a very complicated situation, I think my friend's ex might be interested in me. Now, here's where it gets complicated. Obviously, she's the ex of a friend but they had an incredibly difficult relationship and despite breaking up nearly 2/3 years ago, they've still ended back together at various parties since then. At this point, they're avoiding each other and haven't spoken to each other in months. I started talking to her (purely with platonic terms) on FB and the like and we became good friends. She told me certain things about their relationship and my friend found out somehow and confronted me about it, saying that I betrayed him by talking to her and that I had been talking to her behind his back. This is not true, she was actually trying to encourage me to help my friend because he appeared to be having a difficult time coping with the break-up amongst other things. My friend and I had a massive fight about it but we decided to carry on bring friends. I told her that I would keep talking to her as long as it wasn't about my friend as I didn't want things to become even more complicated. So, everything seemed to be going along fine until the following April (this was 2010) when my friend told me that he had tried to kill himself several times in the last year and that he had become increasingly depressed. I decided that I wanted to try and help him through it but I knew ultimately that he would need to need to consult a GP and possibly even further to get over it. This led to a long summer of hanging around together with him being quite apathetic towards anything and the two of us drinking a lot more than we probably should have. It all came to a head one night when he showed up outside my house at half 1 in the morning (I have gone home early as we were out with another friend) and proceeded to vent for the following two hours about everything he was going through. He told me that he couldn't trust me anymore, I was a terrible friend and when i asked why he couldn't get over one horrible situation, he told me that I had been waiting years to talk behind his back. He also explained that he hoped that anyone who had betrayed him over the years would feel so much guilt over his suicide that they would kill themselves (I presume I was included in that group). Now, since then, we had a brief falling out but we've continued to hang around together. However, our friendship is dead and he has proven to still be the same old person and I'm trying to slowly create distance between the two of us. I don't care about him anymore but we live right beside each during the college breaks so it's difficult to create a distance. So, you may ask why I'm creating distance between us? Mainly because he's not a particularly nice person. He is self centered and shows little remorse for the mistakes that he has made. I believe that he is hiding a lot of things from people. i don't believe he is in college as he has stated before (he has moved between three colleges in the last three years, apparently on some sort of studying across a select amount of national colleges programme). There is evidence that he is borrowed amounts of money that he has never paid back including raising money for charities that he never actually donated. None of our mutual friends seem to like him or trust him. So, I'm sick of his selfish bull**** and I'm trying to cut myself off from him. So, now comes the difficult question, bearing all that in mind, what should I do about his ex? Should we just stay friends? Any advice with this situation would be helpful. Thanks.

LegacyUser

No, not really interested to be honest. I think you're describing the best approach to this thing. I don't need to complicate things any more than they already are. So, to kind of answer your other questions, it's not a revenge thing or an attempt to make him feel worse. I was just more concerned about it more than anything else but it's good to have someone confirm what I was thinking anyway. Thanks for your help.

floorpie

Then it's pretty simple, if she's interested in you, and you're not interested in her, stop talking. Personally i think it was pretty lousy to let your friend's girlfriend vent to you about your friend in the first place, if you didn't know her except through him. That seems like a pretty obvious tension creator.