Unka Glen

livingproverbsfour asked: Recently my best friend broke up with her boyfriend of one and a half years. She still loved him but she heard God saying ‘no’ and she wisely listened. But this guy is insistent that God has told him they would be married. He won’t accept the break up. He keeps texting her and calls her ‘my love’, etc, despite her telling him to stop. He’s even stalked her to where she was hanging out to try and talk with her, insisting he’s not disrespecting her, he just ‘wants to be sweet and not miss a day’. What can she say to make him understand that he needs to back off and realize that they are no longer together? She’s struggling with still wanting the friendship but she’s seeing now how unhealthy the relationship was. What to do? 

Unka Glen answered: Okay, first thing we need to throw out the window, is the idea of being friends with our exes. It sounds Christian, and it sounds nice, and on some rare occasions it works out, but most of the time it’s just kind of creepy and sad to be around our exes, so let’s be real about that.

Second, if he isn’t respecting boundaries, he’s left “romantic” behind, and he’s officially entered “stalker” territory. And my beloved, we don’t try to make friends with our stalkers. In the quiet words of the Virgin Mary: “that’s one lousy frickin’ idea”.

Finally, and this is the most disturbing part, is this “I’ve got a mandate from God” stuff. Leaving aside the theology of free will, and the fact that it doesn’t matter who’s meant to be with whom, it’s still a matter of those two people choosing it, this is just a bad and weird mentality for anyone to have, let alone someone you’re thinking of dating. 

So I suppose a healthy response might look like this:

“In many ways I enjoyed our relationship and our time together, but in truth I’m having a hard time remembering any of those good times because of your actions since our breakup. You’ve disrespected me, violated the emotional boundaries I’ve set up, and ignored my feelings. Whatever there was between us, you’ve ruined it completely since our breakup. And I am as disappointed in you as I can possibly be.

It’s over, and I know you have a hard time picturing what that means, so I’m going to spell it out for you. You are cut off. You are no longer part of my life. My phone will be blocked, you will be removed from my Facebook, and you can go ahead and forget about responding to this email, as I won’t read it, even if it slips past the spam filter.

I’d like to think that maybe you’ve just got your wires crossed somewhere, and maybe you got certain hopes up that shouldn’t be up, and maybe you thought all this was romantic in some way. If so, I hope this serves as a learning experience for you, and demonstrates how deeply unprepared you are for being a spiritual leader. 

None of this is open for discussion, there will be no debate, this is the end of the conversation, because (and this is the important part) this is my life, and I make the decisions. I’ve put my foot down, and that’s the end of that.

I trust that I don’t need to discuss restraining orders, arrests, jail time, and the very real possibility of a cellmate that also, ironically, doesn’t like taking ‘no’ for an answer either.”