I am expecting a flaming here and to be told I am a terrible person! ducks
About 2 years ago I made a male friend. We met through mutual friends and a mutual hobby (we're both fiction writers) and thought we could collaborate on a writing project - after we met in real life we struck up a Facebook chat friendship, and chatted excitedly partly about those and partly just chat about everything under the sun.
I always intended this to be strictly platonic, but after a while I started to suspect my friend fancied me a bit, although not in a concrete way (just, e.g., commenting my new haircut looked nice in a way that straight men don't usually do unless they're up to something!).
I have heard the term 'emotional affair' on MN a lot and while some of the advice rings true, it wasn't secret. I'm happily partnered up and have always loudly sung the praises of DP to my friend. There have never been any points where I confided in my friend more than DP or checked out of our relationship - nothing like that. It was just chat about comedy and films and stuff, but I hold my hands up that in those early days there was too much of it.
I admit I was flattered by the attention initially although my friend isn't attractive (sorry if that sounds harsh) and I would never cheat. After a couple of months of growing suspicion though it made me feel a bit uncomfortable and guilty and just a bit icky. I remember thinking "I wish X was gay".
So after a few months I tried to scale back the online chat - from every day to a couple of times a week - and introduce my partner to him in real life, thinking the best way forward would be if he could be friends with us as a couple.
It hasn't gone all that well. My friend lives in Ireland so doesn't come over to the mainland often but we've met 3 times over the last 18 months and while we didn't get on badly, we didn't get on as well as we did online in the early days. It was a bit stilted.
DP also said recently he doesn't like him. And DP isn't at all jealous or unreasonable - but he says he got a bad vibe off my friend when they met and he doesn't trust him. I believe DP - we both have other opposite sex friends who we see both separately and together and it's never been issue with anyone else.
I doubt my friend intended to cast any bad vibes, I do think he is a nice guy...but we are at very different stages in our life: he is unemployed and lives with his mum in his mid-30s, I'm older and a lot further ahead in my career, and starting a family. I feel like we're going to have less and less in common as time goes on. And it's becoming apparent that our writing styles are quite different so I'm not even sure we should collaborate creatively.
DP is lovely and our future is together as a couple. He hasn't asked me to ditch my friend but I feel like there's not a huge amount of point me pursuing a friendship with someone who actively makes him feel uncomfortable when we have so many lovely friends already we struggle to stay in touch with all of them... so I figured I should extricate myself from this situation gently.
So, WIBU to "ghost" my friend and back away from the friendship? It doesn't feel like the honourable thing to do but having a chat like "I think we should end this friendship" just seems too extreme and would make it worse by creating drama where currently there is none - but is it bad to just do the old fade out? Should I quit Facebook or is that too drastic? What's the right thing to do here?