Dear Manay Gina,
My boyfriend told me that he received a Facebook message from an old female friend, wanting to reconnect with him. I know that this female friend was his former girlfriend. He said that we would both enjoy her friendship.
My first thought was that a woman doesn’t go searching out old boyfriends online to enjoy a friendship with him and his new girlfriend. I think it is obvious this woman is seeing if he might be available to reconnect on a more personal level. My boyfriend says I am being overly jealous. I think opening doors to past lovers is a bad idea. What is your advice?
Mercy
Dear Mercy,
Developing a theory about why this person has contacted your boyfriend doesn’t mean you are jealous; it merely means you are an attentive woman who is able to understand the obvious.
I agree that opening doors to past lovers places your current relationship at risk. Why? Your boyfriend might be tempted to fall in love with the memories, when love was raw and new. When this happens, he should remind himself that his feelings may not actually be based on current realities. In the first place, who they were is not who they are today. People change and they are never going to live up to our romantic ideals that exist in our fantasies.
He did the right thing to share this with you, but he can’t control how you react to it. Given the givens, you should be open to meeting her but skeptical if he chooses to revive contact privately.
With affection,
Manay Gina
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“Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.” – Jacque Fresco
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