You know, the lack of close connections to others is a bit of a red flag. Family - well, ok, maybe he has some horrible dysfunctional family or something, but that shouldn't preclude friendships.
Frankly, it's something I should have paid more attention to with CMM, but he did a good job of SEEMING like he had more connections at first and once his cancer entered the picture it was kind of moot. But it's turned out that he is largely estranged from his daughters and has few friendships that have survived leaving work. I've met a couple of people he used to know that we ran into randomly at events, and we are actually going to a wedding reception for one of them in a couple of weeks - but that would be the first time we actually socialized with one of his friends, which says a lot about his peculiarities.
IF you can just enjoy this relationship as a temporary comfort, that's great. Maybe it never needs to be anything more than that. But if you find yourself wanting it to be more, I think you'll end up disappointed.
