Places I’m not welcome

Amber was going away for a weekend to participate in the nuptials of her roommates and Tina was tapped to stay at the house and look after her pets. I recalled some discussion of this ahead of time and had a fuzzy memory of Amber had telling me I could hang out over there to keep Tina company. When the time came for her to go, however, Tina said to me, “You know you can’t come over, right?”

With everything we had going on at the time, I figured Tina could use some time to herself, but being told that I wasn’t welcome came as a slap in the face. I was fairly confident in my recollection of being told earlier that I was welcome. Tina’s assertion caused doubt, which is exactly what gaslighting is all about. “OK, that’s fine, but why?” I asked.

“Because Kevin and Karen don’t know you,” Tina said. “They don’t want strangers in their house.”

They didn’t know me well, but I’d met the betrothed couple a few times and I got along well with them. I couldn’t imagine a scenario when any of my friends would ask me to house-sit and tell me that my fiance wasn’t welcome or couldn’t be trusted at their home (not even Tina). I was stunned.

That weekend, Tina and I had our first couples counseling appointment scheduled and ultimately, that weekend was also the end of our relationship – not because I wasn’t welcome at Amber’s, but, again,  because of Tina’s ongoing, uncorrected, inappropriate relationship with Nate.

I’m a very easy going person and I get along with people of all walks of life. I’ve never actually been told I’m not welcome somewhere by anyone, ever, before meeting Tina. Scott’s house, the place Tina and Maura spent the majority of their time away from home became a no-go zone for me after a series of circumstances created a hostile rift between Scott and I. This was where Tina and Scott’s son Doug did their illicit fucking out in his barn, whether his fiance Olivia was around or not.

I theorized that Tina maintained separate realities with different groups of people and needed to create rifts and mistrust between people to prevent her incompatible worlds from colliding. She went to considerable lengths to prevent communication between different people in her life.

She definitely saw honest communication between Nate and I as a threat. She made the rather bizarre request of him to block me on his phone to prevent any further communication from her own fiance reaching him.

For the first two years I knew Tina, she never mixed me with her friends. She rarely spoke of them, in fact. She brought me around her family, whose company I enjoyed alot, but I’d only met Shayna (nicknamed Shayna Sidewalk) Keith, the Meth Dealer, her mom’s sort-of beau Scott and his son Doug, Tina’s ostensibly former bang-buddy. Doug was oddly evasive. When I was first introduced to him, he wouldn’t look me in the eye and he shook my hand with his left, which I took as an immediate sign of disrespect. Only after that first meeting did Tina inform me “I slept with him once.” As time went on, it became apparent that “once” was a bit of a miscount.

Scott and Doug were both hostile towards me almost from the beginning and it wasn’t long before I was told I wasn’t welcome at Scott’s.