Dear Prudence,
I live in a small town where I’m lucky enough to have a core group of great friends, most of whom are LGBTQ. During the pandemic we got especially tight, and included in the group was a younger man who was in many ways “taken up” because he was young, single, and gay in a place where there aren’t a lot of romantic/social options. A few years later, he moved for a job opportunity to a more populous area that’s a 6-hour drive away, and I think we all assumed he would find more friends there his own age (there’s about a 20-year difference between him and the youngest of us) and we wouldn’t really see him again. In an unguarded moment, I told him he could stay in my guest bedroom whenever he needed to. This was a mistake.
Shortly after he left, he started driving all the way back to our area to see a health care provider with whom he’d started a course of treatment. In the first six months after he left, he was spending one weekend per month at my house. Once that treatment is done, it’s more like every three months. He’s stayed at my place probably close to 20 times since he moved away.
I’ve come to resent these visits. I don’t much enjoy his company, I’ve realized. He’s not a bad person, but he is boring and we have little in common. These are things you’re more willing to overlook when someone is living in your community. He doesn’t seem to have formed any friendships in his new city, and tends to arrive back here hoping there will be a social event he can join. At first, I shared some meals with him, but this in particular started to bother me because in all these visits, he’s brought a thank you gift, a pound of coffee, exactly once. (I’m not sure he grasps what’s involved in putting someone up for a weekend.)
I’ve stopped feeding him entirely, hoping that he will find my place less hospitable, but it hasn’t had much effect, and it forces me to only cook when he’s not around, which is inconvenient. I enjoy having friends visit, but of course it’s always easier and more comfortable to have the place to myself, so if I do it, I want the visitor to be someone whose company I enjoy. I can’t really tell this man I’ve got another guest because the town is small enough that he’d find out I was lying. I hate to hurt his feelings, but getting that call every three months is really starting to annoy me. How can I extricate myself from that old, rash promise?