Spungen said something in a post that resonated, though not quite to the situation she refers:

But maybe a man still needs to think that, if circumstances were appropriate, a woman would sleep with him. Or at least not know that she wouldn’t. If he somehow finds out definitively that she wouldn’t, he won’t like her anymore. He’ll lose that basic feeling of goodwill toward her. Some guys will even hate her guts.

One of the things that I found so off-putting about Paige (other than the obvious) though I don’t think I’ve mentioned it to date, is the flirtation. And it was a weird flirtation insofar as it didn’t come across as idle flirtation (she did it with absolutely no one else) nor did I get the sense that she was anxious to start something with me.

She would say these things in passing. Things like how I was the kind of guy that she always wanted to date (and sometimes did, but fate usually stepped in the way) before meeting Simon (her boyfriend and my best friend at the company), that I was her perfect type. She never said that it was a shame that we didn’t meet before I got married and she hooked up with Simon, but I got that vibe ten kinds of ways. She’d comment that I understood her in ways nobody else, even Simon sometimes, did. Sometimes she’d say these things with a light flirtatious look, sometimes almost with a sober sigh.

She knew that she had a really good thing going with Simon and I could tell that she was not at all interested in wrecking that. Her kids had the father they never had otherwise, he was a stabling influence in an otherwise very unstable life, and he was nice to her in ways that most of her previous boyfriends weren’t. So fortunately I was never worried about her doing anything and wasn’t worried about being alone with her except for the conversation that she would periodically strike up.

It did lead to some rather disturbing dreams, though I think they had more to do with a previous friend and her girlfriend that I won’t go into at this juncture.

Anyhow, it felt like she was baiting me to tell her that I felt the same, that if things had been different and that we met under different circumstances that things could have worked out. Even if I didn’t revile her and even if things could have worked out otherwise, it’s still not something I would say just because it strikes me as inappropriate. I have consoled an ex or two that things might have turned out differently under different circumstances, but that’s different in my eyes. The most I could ever say in that regard was that I’d dated girls like her before and decline to mention how much I loathed that.

In any case, as much as I absolutely hated the fact that her relationship with Simon forced me to distance myself from him somewhat (because she was so obnoxious, not because of her passive come-ons), I was still nonetheless glad that she had someone. I would have been even more uncomfortable around her otherwise if that were even possible.