Just over ten years ago i left a physically, emotionally and financially abusive marriage where I was a SAHM, got a job, full custody of kids and now have a successful career. ExH is in jail.
When I first started working over a decade ago in the same company I am in now, I rebounded into a very stressful (and I would say again, abusive but in a different way) sexual situation-ship with a more senior person at work from another department. Will call him B. To cut a long story short, I believe B saw my vulnerability at the time and we started sleeping together after work some days. B was single, but I would discover after a year, he was completely obsessed with another colleague of ours who he had, had a relationship with previously and who had broken things off with him.
in the early stages of us sleeping together I was looking for emotional refuge, ignored the blatant red flags and developed feelings for him. B filled most of the time we were together and not having sex confiding in me about his heartbreak over our other colleague. I am afraid my self esteem was so low at the time i was a willing listener to his heartbreak. I was also worried about financial security at the time and affording to bring up my DC so figured I might as well stay on good terms with him and spend the time as his therapist when he asked.
He made out he and this other colleague were in a grand love story, she was “the one,” she’d “faded away” because of issues in her own life and he was devastated and would never get over it. He used to tell me how he would spend hours staring at his phone willing her to call or text, make trips to hotels near her house and stay there in the hope he might see her. He showed me streams of WhatsApp’s he’d texted her through the night vascillating from angry to sad to begging. He was always vague about the reason for their breakup but said it was due to tragedies in her life that made it impossible for her to see him. That circumstances had torn them apart. At the time, all I could feel was very confused. He and I were sleeping together and I had feelings for him but he was just endlessly heartbroken and obsessed with our other colleague who was very obviously unavailable.
Meanwhile in the background he used me 24/7 like a crutch and emotional confidante. She had texted, she hadn’t texted, he caught sight of her in the office. He would suggest he and I go to lunch and work meetings to where he saw in her diary she might be, and that he would “offer me advice” and give me experience etc where he would use the entire time to talk about her. Naturally because this enabled me to socialise across the business more thanks to him, I met more people, got more opportunities and advanced.
fast forward, seven years later, a decade working at the company, we have morphed into more of a relationship over the last three years and now have this decade of shared sexual, emotional and professional history together . He is now approaching retirement and I am above the level he was when I came in. The other colleague he was obsessed with has left, and guess what? He has now become obsessed with ME.
i can’t remember when exactly it flipped but it was about two years ago when my DC had become a bit older, I had more freedom and I decided to date again. As we were not committed to each other and we had the history of his obsession with our other colleague, I assumed he’d be fine with it. He was not at all, and has gradually become stifling and suffocating to the point I feel physically ill when I am around him.
he has completely denied our history and maintains we were in a relationship for ten years. He is doing all the things I watched him doing with our other colleague - monitoring his phone, checking up on where I am, appearing near my house, standing and staring from across the office to the point that other people think it’s very strange. He has emotional outbursts over professional emails where he reads into my tone and thinks I am ignoring him or giving him a message. Some days he leaves me over 50 missed calls.
I have pointed out to him that he is repeating a pattern I have seen first hand with our other colleague. I have told him he has fallen into limerance, suggested he get counselling. I have been angry, understanding, compassionate, direct, all while telling him we were and are not in a relationship but he just rewrites history and gets very angry at the idea “that I would ever compare our love story to the superficiality of his and ex colleague’s relationship”
it’s hard to just cut him off because we work together and because of this shared history our professional lives are quite intertwined. He has also helped me a lot professionally as someone more senior and I am grateful for that.
I suppose I am writing this just to vent. Can you offer any insight into what is going on here and how I can make this go away?