How should I talk to my longtime guy friend about his possibly-creepy behavior w/my daughter? (Or should I bring it up at all?)

So, I (W44) have a longtime, very close male friend (52). I’ll call him Mark. We’ve been close since our early 20s. We were out of touch for a few years (moving around the US) and when we reunited, I was a single mom with two children. Mark started hanging out a lot with me and my two children, which I loved, because I really like Mark, and my kids liked him too. He gave them a lot of attention.

Mark liked my kids a lot, and really liked my daughter, was was about 6 at the time. Like, he’d text me saying how cool she is. And he seemed to prefer hanging out with the three of us to hanging out with just me. At the time, this didn’t seem weird; he works with children and so do I, so we both find kids interesting.

Here’s the weird part. I happen to be aware of the fact that Mark has a tickling fetish, and it’s a big enough issue that he is incapable of having vanilla sex. Tickling-related porn and visiting tickling prostitutes is 100% of his sex life; he can’t have vanilla sex with a partner. Fine, whatever — I never judged him for this.

But one day he was playing around with my 6yo daughter, and he started tickling her ribs and stomach. She actually protested — she said something like “that feels funny!” — and instead of stopping, he made some jokey response and kept going.

This weirded me the fuck out. Not just knowing he had a tickling fetish, but the fact that my 6yo protested and he KEPT TICKLING HER. Combined with already knowing that he’s really into her — almost in a fanboy way.

Anyway, I basically ghosted him at that point. I started making excuses for why we couldn’t get together and eventually stopped returning his texts.

I wasn’t CERTAIN that he was a danger to my daughter. But I felt that if there was even a small chance, I couldn’t take that risk.

I never told him the truth about why I was ghosting him. I couldn’t think of a way to say it that would possibly preserve the friendship. Whether it was correct or incorrect in my suspicions, I knew he’d by hurt by what I said.

Despite what happened, I’ve missed our friendship terribly. Many times I have thought about reaching out to him and trying to reestablish a relationship with him, just leaving my kids out of it. But I never took action, because I could never think of a way to explain to him why I had ghosted him in the first place.

Anyway, Mark has contacted me again. Here are my options as I see them:

1) Resume hanging out with him (without my kids), and make up a lie about why I ghosted him.

2) Resume hanging out with him (without my kids), and tell him the truth about why I ghosted him.

3) Don’t resume the relationship; say nothing to him.

4) Don’t resume the relationship, and tell him the reason.

I’m so torn. I’m a terrible liar and I’d like to be honest. But I don’t want to hurt Mark’s feelings. Despite suspecting that he may have creepy pedo feelings, I still care about him a great deal, and I really miss our friendship. :-((( We’ve been close for over 20+ years. And there’s always the chance that I’m wrong.

Advice? I feel lost in this situation.

TL;DR: I’m afraid my close friend may have pedo feelings toward my daughter, and I don’t know how to handle it.

EDITED TO ADD: Thank you, everyone, for your thoughtful, wise, heartfelt responses. I’m so glad I asked this question here. I had previously only bounced the story off of two people IRL (who don’t know Mark), and both of them were skeptical that Mark was a real threat. I felt guilty continuing to ghost him, even thought my gut told me to do it. But the consensus reaction here has made me believe I was right to trust my gut initially. I think I’m going to continue no-contact, without explanation, and just grieve privately for the loss of of this friendship. 💔 Again, thank you.

Submitted January 23, 2020 at 09:25AM by sar7453 https://ift.tt/38BfXVe