Dear Prudence,
My husband and I recently reconnected with an old friend of his from high school. We all went to the same school; the two of them were fairly close in high school, never dated, while we knew of each other but weren’t really friends. We are all now in our 40s and live in the same area many states away from where we grew up. We have all lived here for 10+ years but only just connected with this old friend at a mutual friend’s birthday party. We had a nice time catching up and agreed to make a better effort to hang out. We thought we had made new/old friends, but now it’s getting very intense very fast and I’m creeped out.
Shortly after this first reconnection, the husband of the old friend started texting my husband, asking if we could get together for his wife’s birthday. They were going to a sold-out concert later that night at a venue very close to our home, but wanted to get together beforehand. We happily agreed, and suggested they come over to our house and we’d invite our mutual friends and we could have a swim and a drink before they went to the concert. Through a series of texts that got more and more bold, this casual get-together started to morph into us throwing her a surprise birthday party, including the husband asking what kind of food and alcohol we were going to serve, dictating preferences, asking how we were going to decorate, and then asking if we could get a specific kind of cake and telling us this all had to be a big surprise. We got very uncomfortable very fast, this was supposed to be literally a couple of drinks by the pool, not a party!
To top it off, the husband said, while he’d like to contribute financially, he couldn’t because funds were tight and he appreciated us footing the bill. We do well for ourselves, but are not in the habit of throwing parties for virtual strangers. Despite feeling more and more uncomfortable as this seemed to spiral, we didn’t assert boundaries at the time, and felt obligated to go ahead with this “party” though we did only the basics, and invited a very small group of mutual friends. We all yelled in surprise when she got there. I personally would be mortified to arrive at a surprise party thrown by people I hadn’t seen or spoken to more than once in 20 years, but she seemed delighted. We served food and drinks and played music and swam until it was time for them to leave, and even though we felt sort of icky about how it went down, we chalked it up to a good time had by all.
But that’s not where the story ends.
The “friend” has now posted several times on social media, with pictures and videos and long posts about how we love her so much that we threw her a party, and how we are like her family, and how grateful she is that we care so much about her to throw her a party, and to “get yourselves friends that want to celebrate you!” I get that’s maybe what it looks like from her perspective, but that’s absolutely not what happened from our perspective. We have other friends we are much closer to, including my best friend who had a milestone birthday (40th) around this time, who we did a low-key dinner with, not hosted or funded by us. It feels like we got suckered into “throwing a party” when we honestly just invited them for a few drinks at our house so we wouldn’t need to get a babysitter, and I’m not comfortable with the narrative that we care so deeply about this person we barely know and that we wanted to celebrate her so badly and so generously that we “threw her a party” but, I guess, maybe we did. And she wants everybody to know it.
Since then, in conversation she has made a few comments that have led me to suspect that this wasn’t actually a surprise at all, but that she was pulling strings behind the scenes to concoct the whole thing. I guess that’s beside the point, and I don’t have hard evidence, but everything feels very off about all of this. Also, since this party has happened, they keep trying to shoehorn themselves into our lives, aggressively asking “who’s cooking Thanksgiving, you or us?” And asking if they can come trick or treating with our kids because they don’t have children. This is way too much, way too fast and feels intensely intimate assuming we are going to spend our holiday family time with them. I have politely rebuffed both requests to spend the holidays with us, but just today I see she has posted a video reel of my husband dancing to Facebook and Instagram for HIS birthday with a long caption about how important “family” is and how much she loves us, and she called us her best friends. She also texted me and asked what “we” (meaning her and her husband and my family) are doing for my husband’s birthday, which is nothing … he’s away on a work trip and adult birthdays just aren’t that big of a deal to us. Which I told her. It’s just. A LOT. Too much.
What am I dealing with here and how do I back this wayyyy up? I’d like to be firm but not cruel. I feel like there’s mental health issues here, and I do not have the wherewithal to help this person. I’d just like to extricate myself and my family delicately but I don’t know what we’ve gotten ourselves into!
—Party Pooper