The man I’ve been flirting with gets offended when I entertain other guys. He also has a fiancée. I’m starting to pull back from him, but there’s another part of this I can’t seem to leave behind: whether she should hear about me before I go.
We met on Instagram about three weeks ago. I’m 23, he’s 24, and his fiancée is 23 too. I didn’t know he was engaged until after I followed him. What has happened between us has been through messages and late-night calls: flirting, affection, and enough attention for me to start liking him. We all live in different states. This isn’t a situation where I know her socially or can draw on some existing relationship with her. I don’t know her at all.
I do like him. That’s the uncomfortable thing to admit, because it would be easier to tell this if I could say none of it meant anything to me. I’ve enjoyed what we’ve had going on. Knowing he has a fiancée hasn’t made the attention stop feeling good, even though it changes what that attention means.
His possessiveness makes the arrangement harder to ignore. He is already committed to someone else, yet he takes offense at the idea of me giving another man attention. He seems to want a say in who I talk to while keeping his own engagement in place. I’ve become involved with a man whose existing commitment should have kept him from starting this with me.
That is why I’m beginning to step back. I don’t want to get more attached to someone who is already committed. Three weeks is a short time to know a person, but it’s long enough for calls and affectionate messages to become something I look forward to. Pulling away now feels different from waiting until I’m further in and hoping his circumstances somehow change.
Telling his fiancée is a separate decision, and it scares me. I could stop talking to him without contacting her. That would get me out of an involvement I no longer want to deepen, but it could leave her unaware of these exchanges. If I tell her, I would be bringing painful information into the life of a woman I’ve never met. I don’t know what she already knows, and I can’t assume I understand their whole relationship from my brief involvement with him.
Part of me wants no further place in their relationship. Another part is troubled by the thought of leaving her in the dark. I’m already starting to withdraw from him. I still haven’t decided whether that means saying nothing to her.
