Don't Say a Word

[Edited June 19 2:38 p.m. PT]

I lost another friend today.

In truth, I lost him a long time ago.

In my heart, I don't think we were ever friends.

Tonight, I decided to put an official end to it.

"I'm going to say this rather than ignoring you," I wrote, "which is historically what people have done to me until I took the hint. I never want to see you or talk to you again. I'm not going to explain why. I just don't. We're not friends. Please stop contacting me. I wish you the best of luck, but I don't want you in my life anymore."

I refused to explain myself, because I thought he should know the reason. It baffled me that he'd continued to contact me nonchalantly as though we were still friends.

After all, despite dating a girl seriously - often confiding in me about her - he often toyed with me romantically, actually seducing me once and flirting and more-than-flirting with me online and by phone. At first, it was flattering, and safe, given we were on opposite coasts. I accepted it. I even encouraged it. I even reciprocated.

And then he proposed to his girlfriend.

And his pursuits continued. When I balked, he claimed it was no big deal, that we were just having fun. But I wasn't having fun. Sexual objectification without intention is not fun for me.

It reached an all-time low on the night of his bachelor party, late into the night, so bad and so humiliating and so manipulative, after spending hours trying to ignore them, I finally wrote, "Please stop."

They didn't stop.

In the nearly six months since then, I've gotten a few messages here and there - including during a time frame I believe was his honeymoon [Ed: He has denied this, after reading this blog post] - and ignored them all.

Tonight, I couldn't ignore them any longer. I had to say something.

He responded, "I'm said to hear you think that we aren't friends, and now for you to say it. Gotcha. Frankly I wish you would've just ignored."

Was I cruel? I think there are plenty of people who have felt the same way about me in the past, but instead of just telling me, they faded away, ignoring my inquiries and invitations, giving me hope that they were just busy or forgot or lost my number. Ultimately, no matter how much the truth hurts, I'd rather know. My sister unfriended me on Facebook - thus ending our entire relationship, as we had no contact outside of Facebook for years - and I still don't know why. I think I'd feel better if she'd said, "I hate you" or "I wish you were never born" or "I'm jealous of all your adventures" or something, regardless of how painful.

Is life much easier if you don't say a word? I've accepted rejection too many times for my taste without question - from potential employers, from romantic interests, from casting directors - and now wonder why I didn't fight for an explanation.

To be honest, I don't know why my parents never loved me. I can speculate about my mother's jealousy of me, her mental illnesses and own traumatic childhood, but my father is not crazy and was not abused. Why did he go along with her? Since they never said anything, I can only imagine it's because they never wanted me in the first place. They always called my arrival a "surprise," but that's only a short leap to "accident" and, worse yet, "mistake."

Maybe if they said something, I would know, and I would feel better.

Or maybe I don't want to know. Maybe no one ever wants to know.

[Ed: Despite the finality of our severed ties, he reached out one last time to explain himself and apologize, though he didn't say anything I didn't already know, and actually pointed to some other events I'd chosen to omit. He then requested that "some of the nasty details" about him, though anonymous, be taken down. While I refuse to take down anything that actually happened, I have made one minor edit above in italics.]

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