I am in serious need of help with a tough situation. Brace for a of long story...
Back in December my close friend/college roommate finally got herself out of her abusive parents' house. She had basically nothing and had decided to drive cross-country to Seattle, where me and some of our other college friends are all living so she could be with people she knew. Since she didn't have enough for an apartment and told me she intended to live in her car, I rallied the house (two other college friends and my now fiance) to help her. We cleared out our breakfast nook to make a "room" for her, told her she could stay with us for free and start paying utilities when she found work. She was so, so happy and grateful to have us helping her. She moved in in January, and we hadn't seen each other since I moved to Seattle.
I have been with my fiance for three years and the two of them have been friends on Facebook for most of that, so they tangentially knew a bit about each other. They each thought the other seemed like a cool person and I was really excited for them to finally meet. My fiance is a very intellectual person who likes having deep and often difficult discussions (one of the things I love about him, as I like these discussions too). As a kid he had an anger problem and learned to deal with it through martial arts discipline. The idea that anger is something you choose, not something that just happens because of another person, is very important to him. Basically, he stops and thinks about his negative emotions before he reacts. (**I want to state here very clearly that he has never, ever been violent or threatened violence towards me in any way, ever and I have never once felt unsafe around him, but when people hear "anger problem" they make all sorts of assumptions**). PNW culture is way, way more blunt than Midwest culture (something I had to adjust to big time when I moved here and started working customer service!), and he is not afraid of stating his opinion or bringing up information he thinks is interesting or useful. He also has a sense of humor dryer than champagne, which he knows sometimes people don't pick up on right away so he's pretty careful to clarify and explain the rougher edges of his personality. My friend has a similar sense of humor and also likes to give her friends an affectionately hard time, so I figured they would pick up on each other's banter in person like they already had over Skype and facebook.
Not long after my friend moved in she started making comments to me about things he said that were upsetting. I'm not talking like, he was making inappropriate comments towards her or telling nasty jokes...things like, when she let us borrow a box of crackers for a party one night, he offered to replace it "too many times", and because she's "not the sort of person who keeps score" and it was offensive to her that he had said it more than once or even offered at all. Or one day out of nowhere when we were having a totally separate discussion, she tells me how sometimes she "wants to punch him in the face" when he talks about politics and economics (again, not that he was saying anything discriminatory or even anything that she herself disagrees with, she just didn't like that he talked about it a lot). I was really taken aback by these things, because I had never known her to be this touchy. I honestly didn't know what to do other than shrug and sort of go, "well, okay?" because they were such odd complaints. Pretty early on the two of them discovered that they have vastly different communication styles; my friend does everything off of her gut reactions, he doesn't. The one thing she said to me about him that seemed actually important was that she told me she sometimes feels as though he's talking down to her. I told her to just let him know. He knows that that can happen sometimes, that he never intends it that way, and that he expects and appreciates being told so he can adjust for that person because everyone has a different idea of what that's like. She told me that talking to him wouldn't help and that she would just deal with it and limit the time she spent around him. Meanwhile, my fiance is telling me that he feels bad because he gets the sense that my friend doesn't like him. So I let him know about her at times feeling talked down to, and ever since he's tried to change the way he interacts with her so she's more comfortable, but he had accepted they would probably never be friends. I was okay with that. It wasn't great, but I could live with it. We got officially engaged on the 10th, I told my friend, she hugged me and said how excited and happy she was.
Then this past Friday while I was at a job interview she exploded on him in the FB thread that all the housemates use to communicate important things about the house (like if someone has guests coming or something breaks etc). One of our other housemates (lets call her HM3) mentioned the toilet wasn't working right and that she hoped it would be fixed soon because she felt gross reaching into the tank. My fiance said he'd contact our landlord ASAP but that the water really was clean and ok to touch. My friend LIT INTO HIM, saying he was invalidating HM3's feelings (HM3 later told me she did not feel invalidated or anything). He told her she didn't have the right to tell him how to interact with other people and that he had already seen to the problem. She lost her shit, calling him an ass, saying that it didn't matter whether or not he meant to make HM3 feel bad and all that mattered was how she (my friend) felt about it, that she had every right to defend her friends, saying this was about her own feelings and that she didn't need to explain them and she didn't care if he thought feelings were a stupid reason to react to something.
He got pretty mad. He told her in no uncertain terms that she didn't get to dictate how the house runs, as she does not pay rent and is not on the lease. He said he did not demean HM3 in any way, that he took care of the problem as soon as he was informed (which he did), and that she had read way more into what he had said than was there. He did not swear at her or call her names, though he confided to me that he had wanted to.
(I know this is long, I'm so sorry...) I see all this when I leave my interview. HM3 texts me to say that my friend has decided she will sleep in her car until we all move at the end of the month. I think this is ridiculous, the whole thing is ridiculous, and HM3 agrees with me. When my fiance gets home the first thing he does is apologize to me because he knows it's put me in a tough spot, but he felt he needed to defend himself. I'd had several hours to think about it by then and I had to agree with him. There were points where I thought he'd been a little harsh, but I do not think he should have just taken it laying down.
With me, my friend tried to act as if nothing had happened. She even asked (via text) to borrow my car on Sunday (I was horribly sick all day on top of being conflicted about everything so I didn't answer). She hasn't asked if I'm ok, she hasn't acknowledged it at all with me. I literally don't know what to do. I keep going from being angry at her to being sad about everything. What makes it so hard is that I know she's been going through a lot of serious emotional stuff, I know she was PMSing like crazy on that day, and I've also watched her go through similar conflicts with previous super close friends. It always ends with her deciding to move out/distance herself as much as possible and there's never been any coming back from that point. I'm also decently sure (because I know her tendencies in these situations) that she's been trashing my fiance to HM3, to his friend's GF (whom she works with at a great job she wouldn't have if it wasn't for my relationship with my fiance), and to her friends back home. Because I've seen her go through this before, I know she's decided she did nothing wrong and that my fiance is just the worst most unreasonable person in the world. Even if on some level she knows she screwed up, that will make her justify her actions even more out of embarrassment. Because she's the one that blew up the situation in the first place and then pretended like everything was fine, I feel like she's trying to force me to choose between her and him and I'm really, really not okay with that. (Ultimately I stand by my fiance, but knowing that makes me feel like the worst friend in the world).
I had wanted her to be in my wedding party. I had already asked her and she had already said of course she would. Now...I don't know. I really don't know what to do. I've tried writing out "letters" to her explaining how I feel about all this and I still don't know! I feel like this isn't my problem to solve for her, I feel like she put her issues entirely onto me so she wouldn't have to just talk to my fiance like an adult, like I asked her to in the first place.
I'm sure this has come up with people before, but I've never had a problem like this and all the advice I seem to find is for either the friend or the fiance, not for the one stuck in the middle.
