Context: We’ll call him Joe. Joe is an early 40s tech guy who had a divorce in the past year after being married 15 years. He met me on Seeking not long after a bad experience he had on there and we’ve been seeing each other for around 8 months. He only sees me

After his divorce, he began addressing significant aspects of his life that had been holding him back. One major area was his social life, so he joined several online communities that organized local meetups in our city.

I’ve been hearing about dynamics of his main meetup group since the start of our relationship. I acted as a bit of a cheerleader and a confidant as well. Joe is someone hesitant, cautious, anxious, and over considerate socially mainly out of fear of having some sort of backlash. A push comes from me every now and again to encourage and empower.

In the past few months, he developed a crush on a girl in the group who is close to his age and newish to the city. I’ve heard him come up with every reason not to ask her out or attempt to get closer in any sort of direct way. Then I started hearing details about what he believes her dynamics are with other people. Most recently, he was telling me about how she is touchy. With everyone, but especially him. He said he considered that maybe she doesn’t realize what she’s doing, but seemed to decide that she knows exactly what she is doing and is intentionally trying to fuck with him. I saw him get mad by it. Then he went down a tangent about how she wasn’t smart enough for him as a long term candidate anyway though there isn’t a way he could really know that as they’ve never been on a date or really had private convos.

His perspective with that just seems so far from reality. He has a narrative in his head that could be checked by actually making decisions he is probably just too afraid to. I understand fear and anxiety, but the super indirect stuff, rejecting her before she can reject him, and the brief anger I saw does bother me.

Between me and Joe, I haven’t really seen the anger, but some super indirect communication that I’m not a fan of.

I’m unsure what to do here. He has something’s he needs to work on and I’ve been a gentle push, but he absolutely needs a therapist. He’s been aware of it since we’ve met.

We would bond over a lot of common interests and deep convos etc, but now I want to pull back. It doesn’t feel worth it to have much depth with him anymore. Is there a best way to do this?

The last time we hung out (after I got further along in processing how I felt about all of it) I ended our hang early. The last thing he went me was that he felt bad about our hangout.

**tl;dr: my SD is angry at a crush of his and isn’t super grounded in reality with it. It’s feeling difficult being close to someone who needs more care than I have to give him.

Is there a way to proceed where our dynamic becomes less fwb and more fuckbuddy? Is this a relationship that just needs to end? If it is, how do I go about it? I think I’m the person closest to him right now and I wanna tread lightly.

I have a very difficult time pretending so that’s unfortunately not an option. I’m open to hearing ways to reframe this in my head.**