I was 27 when I met my ex-employer and she was 52. I met her through a friend, but immediately wanted to work for her company and tried to establish a professional relationship with her, which she happily took up. She put me on a monthly retainer as a contractor for her company (she owns her own company) and I was good at my job. Had great feedback from clients, from her and from other employees.
She started to want to be my friend more. I'd seen her more in a mentor-type role, but she began to want to tag along with my friends and I when we went out and to be part of our personal lives. Against my better judgement, I let her do that. She is unmarried and childless and relies very much on her friends to be her family. I empathised with that and spent a lot of time with her outside work.
Over time, I started to work beyond the hours that the retainer contract designated and started to burnout. I tried to speak to her about it, but she referred me to her HR department. I told them that either my workload becomes less or my retainer goes up. They said they would consider it.
As she owns the company, ultimately the buck stops with her. HR refused to change my contract without giving me an explanation. I assumed that she had refused a pay rise or a reduction of hours. She continued to be all smiles and would not talk about it.
Directly after this, she was in a car accident which damaged her face. She took it extremely badly and called me as a friend three times a week to meet up with her. Each time, she would want to meet at a bar and cry and drink champagne. More than half of those times, she cried so much she had to leave and wondered off into the night leaving me with the bill, which was often £100+ - unmanageable on my salary.
I stopped seeing her because I could not afford her walking out and leaving me the bill. Directly after this, my invoices for the company stopped getting paid and I had to hound them to get to the bottom of it as I was behind on rent. When I finally confronted her about it, she blamed the girl in accounts and said that it wasn't her area. She was just the big boss/owner. Nothing to do with the payments...
After a while I had to go to the second in command and tell him everything. He agreed that the situation was a mess and that she was a mess, but said that he could not do anything. He suggested that I went completely freelance and relied on those lower down the chain to contact me for work as a freelancer when it came up. In this scenario, she wouldn't know when I was getting work and when not, so couldn't interfere. He also suggested I became a limited company, so that she could not detect my association with the invoices.
I agreed to this and was given a new contract "releasing" me from exclusivity to them. As I left that day, the second in command told me that from now on my time would be so full with work from them, that I wouldn't even need to shop around for other jobs.
One year later and I have not heard a peep from them.
However, she continues to want to meet up, texting me, emailing me. I have no clue what exactly she thinks she deserves in terms of friendship after doing this. Luckily I have other work now and can pay my bills, no thanks to her.
Can you tell me what you think actually happened here?