Auntie SparkNotes: This Thirsty Girl Won’t Stop Pursuing My Boyfriend

Hi Auntie,

So I’m halfway through my first year of university, and so far it’s been great. I’m living down the street from the campus in a little flat with my boyfriend of about five years. He made close friends quickly, so those are the people we hang out with.

The problem is that his female friend, let’s call her Faye, realized after a while that she was starting to REALLY like my boyfriend. She avoided telling him until he thought it was obvious enough to confront her about it. They discussed it, he explained that he’s not interested, he’s with me, and he would only ever see her as a friend, she says it’s all fine, she understands and didn’t expect anything anyway, because hello, girlfriend over here? I even talked to her about, told her I wasn’t mad and didn’t mind, I knew she couldn’t help having a crush on a guy she talks to every day. I assumed it would go away.

They would message pretty often, which I didn’t mind because that’s what friends do, but recently, since we’ve been on break and gone to our separate homes, it seems like they talk all the time, sometimes until 3 a.m.

Last week she told him that she still likes him.

My boyfriend feels stuck, because he wants to be friends with Faye, but she reads into everything he says, and he has to be careful not to unintentionally lead her on. She went so far as to ask him, if he wasn’t with me, would it be different? Thankfully he said no, that even if he was single he just doesn’t think a relationship would work.

I’m not sure what to think or what I should do. My boyfriend says if I feel uncomfortable about it, he would stop messaging her at my request, but I feel like that’s drastic. She comes to him with all her problems, he’s one of the few people she trusts. However, she doesn’t seem to be trying at all. When I thought it was a slight crush, I didn’t mind, but she’s hung on to it for months now.

Boyfriend is a lot closer to her than I, and I don’t snoop into their messages, so this is all entirely from what he’s told me. I trust my boyfriend, but is there anything I can do to try to fix this situation and return to some harmless platonic normalcy? That’s all boyfriend and I want, but Faye seems to be giving into her personal desires more and more, and they’re anything but platonic.

We go back to University in two weeks, and we’ll have to see Faye in person again. How do I act around her? Do I discuss it? Should I stay away from the topic altogether? The rest of our friends don’t know anything about this.

I’ll be honest, Sparkler: I’m not so sure about that last part. Unless your friends are profoundly thick—the kind of thick for which that saying about finding one’s own behind with two hands and a flashlight was invented—then I think there’s a good chance that they at least suspect that Faye is not-so-secretly slobbering all over your boyfriend. An unrequited crush of this length and intensity, accompanied by behavior that’s as obvious as it is inappropriate? Uh, yeah. That kind of real-life cringe comedy tends not to go unnoticed.

But that’s just one more reason why, before we go any further, I just have to congratulate you for your absolutely incredible poise in handling this situation. You are a freakin’ model of restraint, my friend. A lot of people wouldn’t have it in them to be so patient, let alone to stay cool and keep socializing with this girl after her repeated, flagrant, ongoing campaign to bogart your boyfriend.

And for that reason, I really wish I could tell you that there was something you could do to stop her. (Or, barring that, at least give you permission to pour a drink over her head the next time you see each other.)

But like you said: This is your boyfriend’s problem to solve—and his current approach isn’t helping. It’s not that he can’t feel bad for Faye (she’s a pretty pathetic figure, by all accounts), but it still behooves him to distance himself from someone who’s brazenly, repeatedly, and intentionally overstepping his boundaries and trying to undermine his relationship with someone he loves. In fact, it would behoove him to do that even if you weren’t in the picture. He knows this girl is ready to misinterpret his every word as containing romantic subtext; he knows that every act of friendly intimacy is giving her false hope. And that being the case, if he truly cares about her as a friend, his next move should be to recognize that it’s on him to stop giving her opportunity after opportunity to embarrass herself. It’s really kind of bizarre that he’s stayed this close with her under the circumstances, and even moreso that he’s acting like stepping back from the friendship is only something he’d do at your request, as a favor to you.

What you can do (and should, I think) is have a chat with your boyfriend, and gently point out to him what he seems not to realize: That his continued closeness with this girl who is actively and continually trying to undermine your relationship doesn’t have to be a problem for you to be a problem objectively. He is enabling (and some might say encouraging) this delusional crush with every 3am texting session, every earnest answer to her “But what if?” questions, and every tolerant response to her totally inappropriate overtures. Isn’t it time he set and enforced some limits, for her sake if nobody else’s? He doesn’t have to be a jerk about it, but a gentle refusal to indulge her—by changing the subject, or saying, “I’m uncomfortable with this,” or even suggesting a temporary break in contact so that Faye can get past her feelings.

If your boyfriend shares your desire to see things go back to normal, then this is where he’ll agree and start setting some boundaries. (Whereas if he won’t do that, then… well, maybe he doesn’t hate the attention quite as much as he claims to.)

Either way, it won’t be your place to intervene further. In fact, the best thing you can do is what you’ve been doing—namely, acting like you have nothing to worry about. After all, a negative reaction from you is exactly the kind of encouragement you don’t want Faye to have; it suggests to her that you’re threatened, which in turn suggests that she has a chance with your guy. You shouldn’t be sending that message anymore than your boyfriend should. And if both of you exert yourselves to politely demonstrate to Faye how much she isn’t coming between you, it shouldn’t be long before she moves on… or if she won’t, before even your boyfriend has to admit that their friendship is over.

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