kj3880

I'm usually posting in the 12-step forum, but this seems more of a codie type of problem that I'm having here, so I wanted to post it here:

Here's the situation:

I had a brief relationship a coupla months ago with a "recovering" addict. I'm almost a year clean now.
He wasn't using but he still had all the personality characteristics of an addict. He was ultra-manipulative, jealous, and controlling. He didn't work, tried to weasel money out of me, and would never respect my boundaries, and I wasn't good at enforcing them.

For instance, he would come over every night without invitation, go through my text messages, read my e-mail, call me a work several times in an hour for the stupidest of reasons (I can't find your nail clippers. Where are they?) Etc...etc...beyond tedious behavior. Make a long story short, after just 8 weeks of dating, I was so resentfull and sick of him that I finally found the strength the get rid of him. Two months ago.

He said he wanted to stay friends, and I don't know about you, but to me, it's just something you say "Let's stay friends, shall we?" When you break up, you don't say that to mean that you are going to go to lunch twice a week and call all the time to gab about things like your Moms' operation, it's just something you say to mean, "Let's not burn each other's houses down or boil each others' rabbits, OK?"

He is taking the idea of "Let's stay friends" to mean "let's hang out all the time and talk on the phone every day." If I wanted that, I wouldn't have broken it off.

How do I learn to enforce boundaries with this addict now we are not together when I couldn't ever do it with the addicts I dated in the past?

Every time he calls, I say, I am not interested in going to dinner. He tells me "well, will you call me when you want to go to dinner?" I told him "It's just not a good idea." But he still calls every day.

And he finds me at every meeting I go to. I don't know how to deal with it without being really mean. He doesn't have to go to the same meetings I go to. They are not convenient for him as he lives 45 minutes away, much nearer to the other area of meetings. He only does it to see me. And we hug at meetings, so he always comes up to me, even though I try to scuttle away, and insists on hugging me. It would look very unspiritual to hug everyone else but not him at NA.

It is messing with my recovery, because now I don't want to go to meetings a lot of nights because I don't want to be bothered by him. And don't tell me "that's why you shouldn't date in recovery." I now know that. I'm not dating any more. But how to I get this to stop in a graceful way?

Thanks,
KJ