My GayBros, you've helped me before and I am hoping you can help again. This is a long and meandering story but I think it's important to get all of the details in since it is a complicated situation. And holy shit, I just finished typing and it is LONG. I am so sorry to anyone that actually reads this! Haha

TLDR: My husband's boyfriend who is my former very close friend does not want to put in the effort to heal the bad blood between us. What do I do?

Last summer I participated in a therapy group for gay men. While out to drinks with some of the guys from the group (Jack), one of the two guys I found attractive told me that he wanted to have sex with me. I told him I also found him attractive and wanted to have sex with him too. I brought him home that night, we fooled around with my husband - it was fun. Jack and I became good friends while the three of us (my husband, Jack and me) also developed a strong friendship. We saw Jack almost every weekend. Jack and I had an immediate bond like none I had ever felt before.

Jack confessed to me early on that he had a crush on me. I told him that I enjoyed his friendship too much and did not want to muddy that with romantic feelings. I told him that a crush was fine, but anything more and we should probably take some time apart to let those feelings cool off. I never felt feelings for him again and lost interest in hooking up. I found out around Christmas that his feelings had continued to develop and that he was in love with me and was hoping for more. I tried to let him down as gently as possible by emphasizing how important his friendship was to me.

I felt Jack pull back some. How he related to me had changed. At the beginning of February, Jack and my husband told me they wanted to explore romantic feelings for one another. I was hesitant, but agreed, hoping that the two of them exploring romantic feelings for one another would reduce some of the tension in our group. I was concerned that adding this dynamic would take away from the little group we had created. I was also concerned about my jealousy. I was worried I would be jealous of the increased level of intimacy that my husband and Jack were going to experience. I was worried I would be jealous of the attention my husband would be paying to Jack. We got a few weeks in and I couldn't handle it. My jealousy got the better of me. I asked them to end it. The two of them catastrophized the whole thing and thought I was asking them to never see or speak to each other ever again. That was definitely not what I wanted. I was trying to save our little group from destruction.

Jack got some bad news in March and texted me and my husband that he was having a panic attack on the platform at Grand Central. Jack is a very sensitive guy and prone to dramatics. I do not want to discount what he was feeling because I believe that he was in fact having a panic attack. But in the few months we had been friends, he had dealt with many crises, and I was growing weary of the constant cry for help. My husband has dealt with anxiety and panic attacks in the past and was there for him. This brought them closer together.

Jack texted my husband one night that he could no longer be friends with him and that in order to continue their relationship, he would need to be able to express his romantic feelings for him. My husband expressed that he still had romantic feelings for Jack and if allowed, he would want to explore them. This really set me off. I had worked through the negative emotions I was dealing with for the sake of our little group, and I interpreted what my husband and Jack were saying as "fuck the little group, our love is more important." I was furious at them both. My husband and I talked through it. Jack and I talked through it. He told me that the only way he could be in relation with my husband was if he was able to express those romantic feelings. I told him that if he really thought that the two of them exploring a romantic relationship wouldn't hurt our little group, I was willing to give it another try.

The two of them went on a couple of dates. I was fine, a little jealous, but fine. But I started to feel a shift again in the way the two of them responded to our little group and to me. I told them I was not happy and that we needed to talk. We met in Central Park one Saturday morning to discuss my feelings. I told them that I didn't want to intrude on their burgeoning relationship but that I was having a really hard time with it. Their response was that they were sorry I was in pain, but that neither one of them thought they had done anything wrong and that they weren't going to change their relationship. To be clear, I never told either one that they had done anything wrong. I only tried to express my feelings of fear, sadness and abandonment. The conversation started to get heated, so I left. I called Jack later that week to discuss a way forward. He reiterated that he wasn't going to change anything about his behavior. So I told him that it was probably best for me to step back from our friendship for a while until I was more on board with their relationship. He agreed.

That was May. Since then, I have felt incredibly angry, betrayed, hurt, sad, threatened, afraid, and lonely. My husband and I restarted couples counseling in an effort to get over these feelings and repair the damage to our relationship. I never heard anything from Jack. Every time my husband and Jack would hang out, I would get so upset. It was very painful to feel tossed out, to feel like their relationship was more important to them both than a relationship among the three of us. Each time they have hung out, I have felt angry at my husband. Knowing the pain that this was causing in me, how could he continue to see him and knowingly inflict this pain on me? I have worked through some of that. At this point I just feel irritated by the whole situation. I feel irritated by the time demands and emotional demands that Jack puts on my husband and the strain that puts on my relationship with my husband.

Jack apparently has also felt very hurt by me. He felt that I abandoned our relationship and he has been mourning that loss all summer and working through that loss with his therapist. It is important to know that Jack has very serious trust issues and issues with abandonment. I assume that my pulling back felt like another abandonment by someone he cared about. I did not know that he was dealing with these feelings until the middle of July. He never reached out to me to tell me what was going on.

Jack told my husband sometime at the end of June or the beginning of July that he has never loved someone like he loves my husband. Keep in mind that Jack has been with his husband for 13 years. They decided a couple of weeks ago to move forward with divorce despite trying to modify their relationship to be more of a platonic partnership than one built on romantic love. I once again felt threatened by the news. I just pictured a situation where moving forward, the emotional support he had been receiving from his husband would fall on my husbands shoulders. I am fine with that to an extent. Despite all of my negative feelings about the situation, I still want Jack to feel taken care of.

In an effort to try and reduce the strain on my relationship with my husband and my husband's relationship with Jack, I wrote Jack an email yesterday where I told him that I was finally ready to talk as promised back in May. I expressed that our goal should not be to restore our friendship but to ease tension on our various relationships to free up space on his emotional card to deal with his divorce and to reduce tensions in my relationship with my husband to allow him to be more available to Jack. My email came from a place of love and openness. Jack responded this afternoon stating that he had no interest in changing the way he relates to me. And that he would agree to talk with me to try and clear the air a bit but only if my husband said it was absolutely necessary.

So that brings me finally to my question. What do I do here? I no longer have any desire to try and reconcile. I was trying so hard to make this work for my husband and for Jack, but it does not feel like Jack has the same interest. It feels like it does not matter to him what strain this puts on my relationship with my husband. And regarding my husband, I now feel like if I don't agree, I'll be painted as the bad guy that is preventing our relationship from healing. My gut reaction is to say that because I've basically gotten the ol' fuck you from Jack, I will no longer feel bad about making my husband feel bad about getting together with him. But that is childish, isn't it? It feels like Jack doesn't care about the future of his relationship with my husband because he isn't willing to be civil with his primary partner (me). And how can my husband continue this relationship that is hurting our relationship with a man that doesn't care about my relationship with my husband? How do I feel happy for my husband to be in this relationship? How do I move past these feelings of abandonment and betrayal?