AIBU to want to keep my friend

[Reba0706]

I have a wonderful best friend, we'll call her Fiona.... who I met at work, we've only known each other two years but we became close very quickly....we're absolute soul sisters - we have so much in common and have already supported each other through some tough times at work and in our home lives (health scares, illness and family bereavement). I can't imagine never meeting her and I know she feels the same.

We are in touch all the time and often have messenger chats after work but Fiona's mentioned in passing a couple of times that she's had to message me from the loo or in secret as her husband doesn't like my messaging invading their evenings.

Fiona is going on a UK holiday shortly and told me that her husband has instructed her that during the holiday she is on a 'ban' from me and isn't to message me at all - controlling much? She seems to be ok with this and has accepted the instruction but wanted to warn me that she will be completely MIA for the two weeks she is away.

I feel like I'm some sort of text-pest...or that's how I'm being treated. Clearly the husband is threatened and jealous of our friendship.

When I first met her a mutual friend told me to watch the husband as he's very controlling, and Fiona doesn't speak to any of her family as she says they are not supportive of her marriage.
I want to keep this friendship but I feel that the husband is becoming more and more threatened by me and my close bond with Fiona and will remove me in perhaps the way he has with the family.

As a person she has very low self esteem and confidence in herself and her husband is her idol.

Today I messaged her to say I was going to stop evening messaging as I could see it was upsetting her husband which I didn't want and she completely ignored the message despite seeing it and the changed the subject entirely as if she just couldn't deal with it.

I guess I'm just after thoughts and opinions

Her dh sounds controlling but she seems to be willing to agree to him. Difficult for you.

It would annoy me if my husbands friend was texting him every night when they’d spent the day at work together!

Another one who thinks you can't just call "control" in this one. You sound very intense and way ott, if the tone of your thread is anything to go by then I suspect the husband might just be sick of constant pinging and texting in the evenings and I think that it is actually fair enough, it's rude to constantly text someone in another persons company. Definitely ease off on weekends and holidays and accept that this might not be a controlling husband, it might be front her too, but also that you seem far too intense and IF she is in a controlling then she probably doesn't need such an intense friend either

It really depends. Are you the sort of person who texts then if no response will keep on texting or asking questions?
You do seem to have a strong fondness for her and I'm wondering if her husband is finding it all consuming at night?
There is also the possibility that she's wanting to back off but using the husband as an excuse.

Could any of these be the case?

I agree with other posters that you need to back off and give this woman some space . You clearly have a strong friendship but you spend all day at work with her, you don't need to monopolise her whole life. Give her a break, when she's home she has ordinarily dull household stuff to do as well as a relationship with her husband to maintain. She's let you know kindly that her week off is time to spend with her husband (which it should be), take the hint.

I had a friend whose partner was controlling. It was difficult to maintain the friendship after a while. She used to come over to my house for a glass of wine and some food, and would take pictures of us together half way through the evening to send to her partner as proof that she wasn't cheating with some random guy. There were other weird things that I could tell you but the list would go on for pages.

She eventually stopped being friends with me because he didn't like her spending time with me and she was too scared of him to go against him. It was really sad as she was a good friend, but I had to accept that there was nothing I could really do. I still hope that she leaves him one day, and if/when she does, I'll be there for her.

One thing I would say though is that you sound very intense. I have some wonderful close female friends who are like sisters to me and I still wouldn't text them all evening every evening. That's too much. In the evening I often want to spend time with my husband relaxing, not be chained to my phone.

Leave her alone! She's tried to tell you. Leave her alone!

His controlling (or not) ways aside, I'm old enough to remember when people lived their lives without being on the phone all the time. Even now, if I was going on holiday, I would tell my family and friends and they would just know not to contact me then, because I'm on holiday. Consequently, I think you should reduce your messaging. I think it sounds too much and if I was her partner, I'd want some quality couple time sometimes too.

How often are you texting? Do you not have anything else to do in your evenings after work?

I’d be miffed if dh spent all evening texting a work mate rather than having dinner together and watching trashy tv or chatting or even going out and doing something.

Surely you run out of things to text her about?

I don’t text anyone when I’m on holiday. If it’s an emergency they will ring but someone best be dying or dead to interrupt my precious holiday time.

@Reba0706 I don’t want to sound harsh but you sound like you’re in love with her and she’s trying to back off.

A friend & I used to message each other a lot in the evenings. I know the constant pinging used to irritate DH (he'd roll his eyes and say things like "God is that her again?"). DH wasn't keen on this friend as she was extremely opinionated and obsessive but never tried to stop me seeing or messaging her. Over time, I started to find the opinionated ways that I had once admired irritating myself. I decided to cool the friendship. The result was that she would message me more with "you OK? " if I didn't reply immediately or "I know you read that". I tried turning off my read notifications but she noticed straight away so had to pretend I turned them off by accident! Long story short, I did shake her off eventually but it was exhausting! We're not friends anymore. she's blocked me off everything.

I'm afraid you do sound a bit like this friend & she may be using her DH as an excuse (kind of wish I'd thought of that). Back off and maybe you can salvage the friendship.

Op from the other point of view, I have friends that text me and message me all day and into the evening, we are very close and I care for my friends a lot, but it drives my dh insane.
We are both busy and don’t have much time to catch up, so when we are at home together he likes to be with me and not me messaging someone else continuously. So I too had put a stop to it, as it wasn’t fair on him and was damaging our relationship.

Spend time with her when she isn’t with him, and give them space. It’s not because she doesn’t value you as a friend, but she has to balance her time, nothing to do with control.
I message my own mother only a few times a week! So anything more is excessive.

You can still remain great friend op

Thank you all for your replies. Very helpful and I think I've got the answers I need now. Just to try and answer a few questions that have been posed to me:
No there's never been anything more between us, I have no attraction to her and wouldn't want anymore than the great friendship we have
Yes I'm in a happy relationship - been with my partner for about 4 years and no he has no concerns about the friendship and doesn't mind her messaging me, he's on his laptop a lot on evenings at the side of me as he does a distance learning course.
I'd say the messaging in the most part is maybe her initiating more than me, then me replying and her coming back to me on my reply so I get that I can hang back from the replies sometimes. Duly noted.
I did say in my initial message that we have lots in common - the main thing is that we both have a strong interest in a particular type of very specialist antique item - we've both said that we've never found another like-minded individual before and I think we're both very pleased to have found a friend we could share with and quite out of the blue. The majority of messages I have to say are around this interest where she asks my opinion on a piece or we chat about the history of a piece.

We don't see each other every day at work - we're in an education setting and happened to meet on our induction week but don't see each other for a couple of weeks at a time.
Hopes this answers some questions that were directed at me

I had a situation with a friend through a club a while back where messaging became very frequent and my DH pointed out how it was interfering with our relationship and asked me to think about how much of our time I gave her and so I quietly and gently backed off of the communication. She was ‘senior’ to me in the club, in fact the founder of it, and so I suppose I’d been very flattered that she wanted to be so friendly with me. I felt special as she was very influential.

DH isn’t at all controlling in any way but he felt marginalised by the frequent messages as I’d got to the point where I’d prioritise messaging with her over spending time with him.

In retrospect I’m so glad he said something, and it takes nothing away from how inspirational I still think she is. But if being part of the inner circle means being available 24/7 to engage with her, I just can’t keep that level of intensity. We have occasional contact now and it’s fine.

Just give her space, if it’s an amazing friendship, it’ll always be there. You don’t need real time text updates to virtually bring each other along with every experience you have, that’s really not healthy, you both should have independent experiences with your husbands/partners that are just for you.