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Dear Breakup Girl,

Let me start this letter by saying I do NOT want my ex-fiance back. I just want to figure out how to be polite and friendly, given we are each other's nearest neighbors we know and have many mutual friends of long standing. Seven months ago I broke up with my fiance/boyfriend of six years. We didn't speak at all for 2 months (he was in Europe), we interacted a little between for the next four, but then he started calling me up a lot in the last month or so. At first I thought that was OK. We talked on the phone, hung out a little etc. Then after the new year it got ridiculous. He called every other day for a week, we spent four hours together one day, etc. The time we spent was generally OK (friendly, not weird), except he would make one inappropriate comment per session. For example, he showed me a pack of underwear he bought and said, "I guess you won't be seeing me in them" or words to that effect.

Last week he told me he had gotten pictures developed from my 30th birthday party (held last May while we were still together), and asked me to come get them. While there, he said, "I have a lot of pictures of you I thought you might want.

I guess this isn't the time to go through them." I thought that was really cruel and heartless. If I didn't take them when I left, I don't want to know about them, you know? I had been thinking about saying we should talk less often and that clinched it. So I said, "Look I'm having a hard time now and I really need to limit our interactions to once a week, OK?" He was very angry but appeared to agree to the request, so I said thanks and left.

Yesterday (five days later, but a week after the phone call that made me vow internally not to call him for a week) he was in the local paper for a fashion article, so I left a message on his machine saying, "Wow, I'd like to hear how that happened if you'd like to tell me. I'm on deadline this week but why don't you call over the weekend if you want to." I really do want to be his friend someday, but if we hang out that much now I know I will end up begging him to take me back and that would suck. (We cannot get married--I tried living with him twice and am fully persuaded that no matter how much we enjoy each other's company, we won't make it as a married couple--religious differences, mostly).

So I don't want him back, but I don't want to be a jerk either, and eventually I hope we'll be friendly enough to go to our mutual friends' weddings with other dates. Is that totally unrealistic? Am I doing OK on the be distant but not a jerk front? Thanks for any advice.

-- Liz

Dear Liz,

You're doing fine. You guys will totally be able to do the wedding thing. Just know this: he has already entered into a serious partnership of his own, and he has even hyphenated: it's called passive-aggressive. You can absolutely count on him to say something like, "Hey, those two look cute up there. I guess that'll never be us." But you knew that.

Love,
Breakup Girl

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