Letting people live their lives and GALing...

[AntoniaB]

Hit submit before I was done!

Ok my only real issue now is dealing with my best friend who I've written about before, who is still having this EA with a coworker. I had said months ago that I didn't want to be hearing about this as I made my opinion known and she wasn't hearing me. Well as the months have crept on, and as I've been more or less "over" the demise of my marriage, she has seen fit to start introducing info about her meetings with this guy to me again. Case in point, the other day she was supposed to have dinner with the guy at some Italian restaurant where their kiss and "I love you" had taken place 6 years ago (and she was married then to the guy she's married to now) and at the last minute he called it off as he had some repair guy coming to work on his apt., and he asked if she wanted to reschedule or have drinks at his apt....she picked the apt. and then spent hours with him having drinks and food and such, and then said on her way home, she just cried her eyes out and didn't know what that "meant."

I mean, I try very hard to help her see that her relationship with herself is just awful. She has zero self-esteem, her health is worse by the year, but she does nothing to try to fix anything. She drinks too much. She hides things constantly from everyone in her life BUT for me. She is not attracted to her husband and claims she never has been. She is only attracted to this coworker, a twice-divorced man who is a bit of a trainwreck but I guess to her a sexy trainwreck, and she just PINES for him. She keeps saying to me she wonders why he doesn't make a move on her because years ago he did, and she was married then too.

She is not able to see that happiness comes from inside yourself first and she is desperate for his attention. No matter what I say about consequences to her spouse if this continues, or the wrongness of it, or whatever, she does nothing but stay put, in this weird world where she refuses to admit that what she's doing is having an affair of the emotional sort. I mean, the night she went to the guy's apt. she claimed she wouldn't tell her spouse as "he might be angry he wasn't invited." Another lie.

So what I did was to say I loved her and hoped she would find her way but that I cannot be part of this anymore. I can't be the person who gets told the sordid details of what goes on in her head or for real. I am FRIENDS with her spouse. I feel like I am betraying him.

She is not happy with me. But what can I do. I feel like there are people in life who can't seem to be moral--and they want to use other people because it's easier than actually facing themselves. And just like my XH, this woman can't be helped by me. In fact, the more I try to help, the more she seems to defend what she is doing. So I'm walking away from her.

I feel like my life has come down to this. I meet many people, and I end up having to weed out who is selfish and hurts others for their own gain vs. who is genuinely good and caring and empathetic, and the ones who aren't empathetic I just have to detach from. Because my instinct is to try to TEACH them empathy or model it for them, and in every case, I fail. I can't model it. They just turn a blind eye.