I have an old acquaintance, the kind who'd communicate two or three times a year and came to stay for a weekend every couple of years. She's quite interesting but not someone I felt any special bond with. I knew she liked the area where I and my partner live but I was pretty stunned when she turned up on our doorstep last year and announced she'd bought a house a ten-minute drive from us.
It's needed a lot of work and to start with I was happy to suggest a couple of local tradespeople when she asked for recommendations. This slowly turned into more of a dependancy on me: she'd be phoning a dozen times a day to grumble about the builders and ask me to go round and help her decide where electric points should go, or what kind of architraving she needed — loads of decisions she couldn't make on her own. In the early days, when the house was barely habitable, my partner and I got into the habit of offering to cook for her a couple of times a week and she came to our home for baths and to do her washing. It was all right to start with, but she never brought food or offered to take us out for a pub meal and it started to get very uncomfortable. We put an end to it as soon as her kitchen and bathroom were finished. She kept saying how much she missed our meals together, but we held firm.
We're sociable people so we invited her to a few social events. She's very quickly created her own friendship circle among our friends. She talks about 'my good friend Jayne' and 'my good friend Simon' as if she's known them for years, and we began to realise that she's been setting up private get-togethers with our mates without telling us. It's a bit weird to discover down the line that one's close friends have all, individually, been invited out to lunch or dinner with her, and haven't mentioned it to us. I think a few of them are unhappy about it. I suspect they think we've encouraged her to get to know them and they aren't keen on her and are now a bit peed off with us. I've made it clear to anyone who says anything that she and I aren't great friends and that they're not to think that because she's someone I know, they need to befriend her.
It's all beginning to feel difficult. I had no idea that she was like this from our 15 years of occasional visits. If I had, I would have drifted away from the relationship and let it die. Now it's too late and she's firmly enmeshed in my life. What would you do?