Had a random message pop up just now that prompted me to ask this question: how do you manage men who seem to just orbit? It happens fairly frequently for me, and FDS has me wanting to look at things from a new lens.

I tend to have a lot of male friends / acquaintances and coming from a small town, these are most likely people I've known for years. Like as teenagers. Current message that has just popped up is from one such friend who maybe messages me every couple months? Lately it's been at least once a month. I did have a short fling with him a couple years ago and I just ended up kind of ghosting because I was not interested and something serious, but we have maintained friendly enough contact since then. A couple years ago when such pop up we hung out and I did end up backsliding which I have regretted and have since removed myself from. We did hang out once a couple months ago because he happened to stop at my house and it was totally PG so all that's fine. I just don't know what to make of him constantly popping up? And he's not the only person to do this.

I also had an old high school acquaintance pop up a couple of months ago that I got a little caught up in for a hot minute prior to finding this group. If you saw my first post you'll know that I am in unsatisfactory relationship with somebody, so the attention from this person was nice and kind of help me to remember that I am in fact desirable, but he's been really hot and cold and it's not something I'm trying to focus on right now since I'd rather deal with the situation I'm in currently first. I did engage in some flirting/pursuing via text, but I've since stopped talking to him since I was doing all the initiating and he wasn't. I do fully expect him to pop back up when he's back in the area though and looking to have a better understanding of this behavior so that I can resist his charms.

Even the guy that I'm currently seeing is somebody whom I had known for a long time, we were FWB's a few years ago and he ended up dropping me for another woman after a year of doing that. Years later he pops up tells me things I had wanted to hear, and my stupid self has ended up here. At least this time it's been exclusive but he is just taking up space and I need to pull the trigger to move on.

I have a narcissistic ex-boyfriend whom I have not spoken to in 2 years who likes to send me a text message "how you doing" once a year even though I don't respond.

I guess some part of me took it as a compliment that guys will pop back into my life and seemingly regret dropping me, but thanks to this group I'm realizing that's most likely not the case. I'm still hoping to better understand what the motivations are considering that most of the time I'm not really engaging them back? The one guy I don't really have a problem with being friendly but I suspect that he's sniffing around hoping for another shot and the other guy I had mentioned did catch my interest so I think I need to be prepared to either vet him or next to him before I get wrapped up into another LVM situation.