Reader Jane faces a dilemma. Her LO has invited her to his wedding. He’s also being weird about it.
Before Bride arrived on the scene, Jane disclosed her feelings to LO, hoping that their close friendship would become a relationship. LO gave an ambiguous answer, and carried on as before. Even now, he continues to drop little hints of special closeness, just teetering on the right side of social propriety. Things like: using pet names for her, and inviting some of Jane’s other friends because he wanted to make the day “something Jane wouldn’t want to miss”.
So Jane’s dilemma is whether or not to go, and how to manage the day if she does. With a side order of wondering what the hell he’s up to.
Here are my thoughts:
If you have a fairly analytical approach to life, you quickly learn that a lot of decisions can be simplified by running a quick and dirty cost/benefit analysis. Here goes:
1. Costs
- You suffer the discomfort of seeing the person you are infatuated with marrying someone else.
- You have the indignity of smiling and clapping and pretending everything is awesome when you actually feel like shit.
- You spend the day wondering if he’s going to pull his “special friend” routine with you in front of his bride or family.
- You get to see his new wife at her most beautiful and radiant, making you feel really great about yourself.
- He might get drunk and blurt something embarrassing out.
- You might get drunk and blurt something embarrassing out.
- You have to buy a wedding gift, which is a combination of a financial cost and a potentially gigantic time sink as you spend ages wondering what each gift communicates about your feelings for LO.
2. Benefits
Er…
- A… free dinner with some friends?
It’s not a massively close run thing in my mind. All costs and no benefit.
A friend who plays with your feelings is not much of a friend
A last thought from me before handing over to the wisdom of the crowd is that Jane’s LO is obviously keen to keep her hanging around. Keen for her to still be part of his life. Now, that may be because he is a raving narcissist looking for supply, but it could also be less toxic.
Many people don’t know how to handle it when a friend declares romantic feelings for them. Some can feel that it would be very hard-hearted to push their friend away out of embarrassment, and so they sort of overreact with extra friendliness. Still more are flattered, and quite like the fact that their friend is crushing on them, and so they carry on being friendly and open, blithely unaware of the pain they are causing to their limerent friend. Or how their erratic behaviour is heightening the uncertainty for the limerent, and turning up the dial on their obsessive thoughts.
So it’s possible that the pet names and attentiveness from Jane’s LO are just heedlessness – but that’s the best that can be said about it. You have an emotionally heedless friend. The worst is that someone is messing with your feelings for their own gratification, under the guise of being an affectionate friend. Which is really very unpleasant when you think about it.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: trying to be friends with an LO is a hopeless cause. Good friends are like diamonds. LOs might be sparkly too, but they occupy a different emotional category. It’s regrettable to lose someone who could have been a friend under different circumstances, but not as regrettable as pining your life away on a misguided attempt to re-categorise an LO.
Over to the LwL community: what would you do?
LO #2 declined my marriage proposal and moved across the country. The breakup was as amicable as it gets. I held out hope that she’d come around, move back, and we could make things work. We stayed in occasional contact. She’d replaced me and I was dating again.
About 6 months after we broke up, she said she was coming into town for her cousin’s wedding and asked if I wanted to go with her. I knew him and took it as a sign she might be coming around so I agreed.
It was miserable. It was the most self-inflicted pain I’ve ever experienced. Sitting next to her knowing that would never be us was more than I could take. I had to leave after the ceremony. There’s a lot more to that story but it’s outside this discussion. I still have a picture of her taken at the wedding.
To me, the only possible upside to this is if Jane is sure that watching her LO get married will close the books. But, from his behavior, he doesn’t want to close the books. That puts her as the 3rd side of a triangle and nothing good will come from that.
My recommendation is to not only decline the invitation but write him off. Stay involved with him and this may not end well for anyone.
@Scharny….I think this is good advice and a good cautionary tale.
Don’t go. Send a gift if you feel you must but DON’T GO.
You don’t want to be in the role of hypoteneuse in the triangle and he didn’t choose you. The emotional cost to yourself is too high.
Then go read up on trauma bonding and run fast and far.
May I offer you a night out, dancing, with some other friends instead? Get hot, sweaty, tired and be too active to care. Or at least be tired and foot-sore in the morning.
Decline without explanation. Not a dilemma.
“2. Benefits
Er… A… free dinner with some friends? ”
By the time you’ve added up all the financial implications of attending a wedding, it is usually anything but a free dinner!!
Totally agree – avoid! May be hard to decline, but would be even harder to attend.
What a brilliant analysis of a misery inducing situation and what refreshingly robust responses! I love this site!
“The worst is that someone is messing with your feelings for their own gratification, under the guise of being an affectionate friend.”
Oh no, that may not be the worst thing. S/he may be using you to point out to the new spouse that if they ever fail to please, your LO has OPTIONS. So don’t feel secure in your role, Spousal Unit.
Anyway, I hope Jane declined with no explanation. It’s all pain for her. No matter what justifications LO used to invite her.
This is helpful in organizing thoughts and feelings. Thanks Dr. L! A similar cost benefit analysis might be made for invitations to other special social events by LO. For example, a once-in-a-lifetime trip with them and some friends (where it might include their significant other). Or sharing in a celebration of something in their life, like an accomplishment or recognition. Guilt in not supporting them or in disappointing them could arise. Once again, not a benefit.
This sort of ‘dilemma’ is the limerence hijacking your brain to make you obsess about the limerent object. The right answer is obvious to everyone else in the world but it is a mysterious dilemma to the limerent. The limerence is making Jane desperately want to go to the wedding, to see him, to have a strong emotional moment in his presence. I’ve used this as a metric to determine when the limerence is actually over – when I no longer care. If this were me, I’d know that as long as I think going to the wedding is important, I must still be in limerence and I shouldn’t go. If I want to end the limerence, I should do everything in my power to avoid thinking about him, such as skip his wedding. The only time it’s OK to go to his wedding is when I don’t want to go because I don’t care anymore.
This is such a great post SS, and advice we’ll worth heeding. Whenever I do one of those personality tests, like MBTI and the like, I’m always super logical, analytical, evidence based etc. Yet with my LE, even though I could always see what the logical decision was, it was just so hard to actually take that option. I think your framework here is the way to go.
I agree with you Vincent and Serial Sufferer. In limerence, it can be so difficult to choose the rational response over the emotional response. The emotional side is SO strong. Either choice is a losing option to the limerent in the short run. If one goes, then one will say “Why did I do this to myself?” If one skips the wedding, then one will say “I wonder what LO, bride, friends, etc. are doing/thinking.” In the long run, I believe it would be beneficial to have not gone to the wedding, to NOT have the images of LO at his wedding etched permanently in the mind. The fantasy of what is happening/did happen at the wedding will dissipate fairly soon.
Maybe Jane feels she wants to go to keep the contact going. To get the limerent hit, see in his eyes if he really loves his bride and, let’s face it, on the off chance LO sees her, realises his mistake and leaves the bride at the altar, running off into the sunset with Jane, hooray! When you’re limerent, these decisions are hard. She is probably also wondering whether the agony of going will be worse than the pain of not going, thinking about it all day long, being totally miserable, and wondering whether she made a mistake.
This is a no brainer really, and if she reads this site I’m sure Jane knows it. She would obviously do best not only to avoid the wedding, but to go NC with Mr mixed messages (is there not a special place in hell for these LOs??).
But if she does crack and go, I say she should not be too hard on herself during the ensuing emotional fallout.
Serial sufferer we overlapped. You said it better 🙂
Even if Jane doesn’t want to go to the wedding she may be concerned about all her and LO’s mutual friends and family wondering where on earth she is if she doesn’t show up. If scores of people think of them as “besties” and she isn’t there then her cover is blown and folks might say “she must have been in love with him all along and not ‘just a friend’ after all and now can’t handle going to the wedding! Poor thing!”. The ensuing aftermath of interrogation would add to her suffering no doubt. Seems she would need an airtight alibi as to why she wasn’t there to avoid suspicion. She surely isn’t obligated to disclose the real reason to the whole world.
Yeah, I guess that’s the heart of Jane’s concern: how it will appear to others if she doesn’t go? I suppose my view is guided by purposeful living – 1) It doesn’t actually matter what other people think (we can’t control it, after all) and 2) Does going to the wedding help me reach my goals and live my life how I want to live it?
If people have formed an opinion about LO and Jane’s relationship then they’ll probably interpret whatever choice she makes as supporting that opinion. But I also think most of us also overestimate how much other people assess our behaviour – we’re oversensitive to how attentive other people are being and (bluntly) how much they even care about our business.
If I were a bystander at LO’s wedding, who had been wondering about the relationship between them, I think I’d mostly admire Jane for not going, to be honest. But I may be odd 🙂
“It doesn’t actually matter what other people think (we can’t control it, after all)”
This could have been worded better; keep in mind, this rule shouldn’t be a ‘rile of thumb’ for limerence as it can have clearly flawed consequences. For example, the only reason quote a few of us are here is because we want a way to keep it in check and no one to find out, especially not LO. So to implicate this rule, you are completely disregarding this factor.
Additionally, it could have more serious consequences; say, for example, Jane doesn’t care what anyone else thinks and says she loves her LO at his wedding. This could break up the marriage and cause people to harbour presumptions or resentment towards either party involved in the LE.
Most likely a poor choice of words, but something you, Dr. L., as the runner of this site, should not be advising people (even if just indirectly or implicationally).
There’s quite a gulf between “It doesn’t matter what other people think (we can’t control it, after all)” and “do whatever you like”, AL.
The point in this context is that you shouldn’t make important decisions on the basis of how it might affect other people’s opinion of you. People will think what they like, regardless of your intentions. You should make decisions on the basis of the kind of person you want to be, what kind of life you want, and the goals that matter most to you.
Even if you stay true to your principles, there will be people judging you and questioning your motives and misrepresenting your behaviour. That’s part of life. We’re wired for gossip.
If anyone thinks that crashing a wedding to declare their love for the groom is living purposefully, well… I think they may be a bit beyond the help of this site.
Dr. L, you are right. I would admire Jane too, for finally having some spine in her limerence, and not going. Doesn’t matter a whit what people think, particularly LO.
I agree with DrL that few people will likely notice Jane’s absence. If it comes up later at all, it would probably come up in the form of something like, “I thought you’d be at LO’s wedding.” Jane’s comeback could be a smile and “I was but I got a better offer at the last minute.” Don’t elaborate and don’t respond to texts, social media, etc., until late on the day of the wedding.
In this case, considering what others think is going on is a convenient form of rationalization. “I’m not going because I want to, I’m going because I have to….”
Yeah, I know how that one works….
“Things like: using pet names for her, and inviting some of Jane’s other friends because he wanted to make the day “something Jane wouldn’t want to miss”.
The more I read this the angrier I get at her LO. This is UNKIND. He’s yanking her chain and he may be yanking his fiancee’s chain too. I hope you wouldn’t want to be part of this. Why is Jane’s attendance so important on his wedding day? The most important people there are the couple, the officiant and a few witnesses who could be chosen at random.
It’s an invitation, not a warrant for your arrest. Please don’t be part of this, Jane. “No” is a complete sentence. So is “No, thank you” if you must. Explanations are not necessary.
I am in this situation as well. I mean, I’m Jane in my life.
After reading your, Lee, answer I can tell you that ppl are also just silly. I mean, my LO acts similar, keeps me attached, wants me to be around even tho I said many times what I feel. How can you explain that? You can be angry, but tbh I cannot imagine how could anyone act like that, consciously. I don’t get it. And I see that some people are just disordered (ie. narcissists). Or just simply dumb.
I feel so sorry for Jane. I really do. Ofc the right answer here is: NO. But that is not the point. From my perspective, you always struggle to do what you really should do. I KNOW EVERYTHING about how bad it is for me, to stay in touch with LO etc. But I can’t just let it go. I’m lonely, abandoned, got my needs, seek for help and simply for any reliever. And I’m ashamed. Cuz can’t stand it on my own.
What should Jane do? The answer is very simple. The question is – is she able to do that? At what cost? I am devasted.
“How can you explain that?”
Your LO is also unkind.
“But I can’t just let it go.”
You CAN, but yes, it’s very hard. You have to figure out how to fill in those gaps that LO currently plugs for you and it would be best if you didn’t only look to others to fill those gaps.
“Cuz can’t stand it on my own.”
Yes, you can. You will wobble, you will stumble, but you can do it. Give yourself permission to not be 100% perfect in your quest.
I hope you succeed.
My LO gave me mixed messages like Jane’s did too. It is indeed torture and I would not wish such an experience on anyone.
The painful truth is that Jane is going to have to get over this LE sooner or later. Her future self will be extremely thankful if it’s sooner rather than later.
Give future Jane a head start and cut this cruel LO off, sister!
I think there is a point that we are ignoring about Janes dilemma. She may actually now feel like this could be the end to her limerence (yay for Jane!), she may now be disgusted with LO and not even want to go to his wedding, but as she shares many mutual friends she could be wondering how to deal with the discomfort of being questioned “are you excited about the wedding? I know as close as you two are you wouldn’t miss it! Wait you’re not going? Seriously?”
I think Janes absence will be very much noticed, some might even expect her to be in the wedding party.
Not a reason to force herself to go, but how can she gracefully decline without an airtight alibi but still have an answer to the questions and squash potential gossip ?
I don’t think Jane is the type to say “I got a better offer”, that’s not her style.
I have no epiphany solution for Jane, sadly.
“I’m not attending.”
Rude/nosy line of questioning follows.
“It’s personal.”
The most persistent don’t take the hint.
“I’m not going to discuss it.”
If she is a member of the wedding PARTY, that probably would’ve been mentioned. Plus she can back out. It’s not likely the bride asked her to do so and it’s still fairly uncommon for a non-family female member be asked by the groom to participate.
I’m assuming the parties are a cis-gender couple.
I heard this on the radio this morning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cTIYd8avmI
@Sharnhorst
Perfect! Reading through the YouTube comments sounds like lots of limerents still suffering! One after 40 years! Yikes…
@Dr. L,
Did your LO Inviting you to the wedding and then you declining end your limerence?
It was already post-disclosure to my wife, and I was in the thick of the “mental reprogramming” campaign at that stage, so it was not a difficult decision.
I do relate to what Serial Sufferer said upthread about wanting at some level to share a strong emotional moment with her, but mainly my feelings were powerfully negative – I didn’t want to be anywhere near it.
LO #2 could have sang that song about me.
Not 10 minutes after learning I was seeing my wife, LO #2 came on to me culminating in those immortal words, “If I sleep with you now, you’ll own me again.” I declined the offer and 2 weeks later, I said goodbye.
I was married by the end of the year. I shared an accountant with her family so I’d get periodic updates. Within a year, she was engaged to a real estate developer from Long Island. She had a roommate whose BF was a real estate developer from Long Island. What were the odds? Given her affinity for cheaters, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn she poached him.
They married, moved back, and her husband worked with the guy that introduced me to LO #2. She filed for divorce less than 3 years later. The guy he worked for told me her husband was shellshocked & didn’t know what hit him. That I believed.
From what I saw on FB awhile back, she’s engaged/married now. Back then, LO #2 didn’t respect anyone she could control and didn’t trust anyone she couldn’t control.
Yes i would also decline without explanation!
My lo is getting married this year and told me recently do you want to come to my wedding because i dont want to be accused of not inviting you. I said no straight away. It wasnt a real invite but still just the thought of it makes me feel sick… why would you want to go and suffer? For me its not even a dilemma…
Good luck!!!
@grizlybearr How are you doing? I was touched by the pain in your post…and am hoping your suffering has abated.
Dr Limerence do you know what Jane decided and how she is getting on with her decision and the changed circumstances of her LO? I wish anyone in her situation the best and know how very hard the decision and dealing with the longer term situation can be.
I don’t know, Nina. If she gets in touch I’ll update everyone.
But it was a pretty clear steer from the commentariat 🙂
Update:
Jane got in touch again with more news. It turns out (prepare yourself for the shock, folks) that LO is a total loon! I know! Shocker.
Jane found out from a mutual friend that LO and bride are already married. They had some kind of hurried secret wedding, and this “wedding celebration” event is some sort of… cover story or something? Obviously, LO didn’t feel the need to tell Jane this, even after saying he would to their mutual friend.
That settled any last vestige of guilt that Jane might of been feeling about declining.
(I really did pick the featured picture well for this one!)
With respect to the “secret” wedding, there may be a perfectly benign reason for this.
My parents both died in the 1970s. I have their wedding album but I can’t find a single thing that provides a date. Looking at the pictures, I recognized the church they got married in. I called the church office and based on when he was in college, gave them a starting date. About 15 minutes later, the church secretary called back and gave it to me. She said there was a note that a civil ceremony had been performed about 6 months earlier. She said that was odd.
I told her that it wasn’t. Dad had said that he and Mom had lived in married student housing his last semester. To get into married student housing, they had to have a marriage license. It made total sense.
As for him not telling Jane, yeah he’s a schmuck.
“Before Bride arrived on the scene, Jane disclosed her feelings to LO, hoping that their close friendship would become a relationship. LO gave an ambiguous answer, and carried on as before. Even now, he continues to drop little hints of special closeness, just teetering on the right side of social propriety. Things like: using pet names for her, and inviting some of Jane’s other friends because he wanted to make the day “something Jane wouldn’t want to miss”.
In light of the update, shouldn’t this be changed to WIFE? LO isn’t a “loon” – he knows what he’s doing. He’s looking to cheat on his wife.
I hope this leads to Jane getting over him. Sounds like a piece of work. Good luck Jane
I had the opposite experience, where I was someone’s LO, and he invited me to his wedding. I was recently single, and despite his engagement, he had grown way too emotionally close to me since my breakup. At the end of his wedding, he hugged me goodbye, and I could just tell by the hug that whatever he was imagining for his wedding night, it might not have been his bride he was fantasizing about.
Fast forward a few months, and we were working the same place. We ended up going on a business trip together. He offered to book our hotel rooms, but I declined and booked my own. Somehow, though, we ended up with adjoining hotel rooms on the trip. I was friends with this man’s wife, so it was incredibly awkward, and in fact I punished him the entire way home by talking about his wife non-stop the whole way. He deserved it.
It sounds to me like you did everything you could to avoid feeding his limerence. Talking about his wife might have helped him in the end. Do you think his limerence is over now?
How did he get so emotionally close to you? Did you confide in him about the breakup, etc? Not to be accusatory, but I am hypervigilant now not to ignite limerence in others as I know I have shown a lack of self awareness and done this in the past. I now am acutely aware of the agony of limerence and as difficult as it is I no longer lean on male friends or let them lean on me as someone always ends up getting burned. It’s really hard with reliable, decent, funny, helpful “platonic” friends but I am trying to use self control. Especially when they “play it cool” I think I am safe to be their friend, and I cannot hurt them, but then I remember that I played it cool with my LO’s and thus welcomed them continue feeding my limerence. Sometimes we cannot prevent or prolong others becoming limerent for us, but sometimes we can.
I think talking about his wife was not a punishment, it was a kindness. I am sure your motive was to help him. Hopefully his limerence died down and he fell back in love with his wife.
“Many people don’t know how to handle it when a friend declares romantic feelings for them. Some can feel that it would be very hard-hearted to push their friend away out of embarrassment, and so they sort of overreact with extra friendliness.”
Personally, I am rather surprised at how hard it is for people in general to disillusion an unwanted romantic admirer. And I’m surprised at how reluctant people are just to be blunt. I can definitely see how “extra friendliness” could be counterproductive in a limerent situation. It’s just more fuel to the limerent fire…
I’ve realised that in my entire career as a “lifelong limerent”, I have only ever had one person tell me that my apparent interest in them made them feel uncomfortable. This suggests the following possibilities to my mind:
(A) I’m really good at hiding limerence.
(B) My LOs are oblivious to my limerence.
(C) My LOs notice my limerence, but are either super-polite or utterly indifferent, and so don’t bother saying anything.
(D) I’ve only ever experienced true limerence once – the one time I made someone feel uncomfortable – and everything else was “generic crush/random physical attraction” material, and nothing that anyone wasted any time worrying about.
Thanks to this site, I feel I’m over that one LE where even the LO called me out on it. I feel I’m at peace now with how it all played out. I can let it go mentally.
There is one guy who I’ve been quite strongly attracted to in recent years. He’s what might be described as a “friendly LO”. He’s friendly to me. However, whenever I give him an opportunity to get closer to me, e.g. a prolonged hug or a conversation that goes beyond mere pleasantries, without fail, he gently brushes me aside, even though he is both gay and single. He’s very good at brushing me aside – he hasn’t hurt my feelings yet. He’s one very tactful little bunny rabbit. 😛
On the basis of advice I’ve gotten from this site, I’ve decided to stop pursuing him altogether. He likes me as a friend – nothing more. He’s being nice about it, too. If I push for more, I’m only punishing myself and likely alienating him in the process. I don’t want to put him in an awkward position. Of course, giving him up as a current/potential LO means giving him up as a friend, too. But I think the benefit of a “mind at ease” outweighs the cost of a lost social connection.
I want to let him be free to fancy whoever he fancies and evidently that’s not me. Enough said. Time to let go. I don’t want to be the recipient of “extra friendliness” again. I don’t want someone mincing their words around me because they’re scared of causing me pain. I’m comfortable sitting with my pain now until it passes. Plenty of life experience under my belt. Yeah, I think I’m good. 😛