Dear Prudence: Resuming Friendship With a Thief

[minoanmiss]

About two years ago, my partner and I discovered one of our best friends had been breaking into our house (via a door we occasionally forgot to lock), stealing a prescription medication, and replacing it with an over-the-counter drug that looked very similar. This went on for months until we caught her on a home camera. I confronted her in the most compassionate way I could and made it clear that our friendship was over. We run in similar social and professional circles, and we are always cordial when we bump into each other.

We have texted occasionally, and lately any text exchange (usually started by her) ends with her telling us how much she misses our friendship. We have since offered her forgiveness, but I know that our confrontation triggered a mental health downward spiral for her. She has been open about this on social media. I have always felt a bit guilty about this, even though I know it is not my fault. It seems like she is getting help, although she seems far from well. Truthfully, I miss our friendship and am considering rekindling it. My partner has no interest in this, but I am sure he would not mind if I socialized with her. The trouble is that we used to almost exclusively hang out at my house, and neither of us feels comfortable having her in the house again. Should I even try to pick up the pieces of a once-valued friendship? Did she truly go too far breaching our trust for a friendship to be possible? If so, where should I begin?
—Bouncing Back From Burglary

Check with your partner first to make sure he really wouldn’t mind if you started seeing her again. If he’s truly OK with it, you two might want to agree upon a few ground rules first. Not having her over to the house strikes me as a reasonable one. Has she ever offered a meaningful apology to your partner? You say she’s been open about her struggles on social media and seeking help and that you’ve offered her forgiveness, but if she’s never directly apologized to your partner for stealing his medication and endangering his health, it’s worth raising the issue with him. Would he be interested in hearing an apology from her? Would he prefer she just leave him alone? Does he want you to invite her to group events if you two reconcile, or does he want to make sure they’re never in the same room together?

Once you have a strong sense of what he needs in this situation, you can proceed with caution. You don’t need to go back to the old friendship you two had before. You can build something new together on a different foundation, one that can acknowledge the past without remaining stuck in it. Meet up at a coffee shop or at her house, or take a walk together. It’s possible to hold a new kind of boundary without holding her past behavior over her head in perpetuity.

Comments

[cimorene]

Yeah, that covered everything that I was thinking.