Leaving The Past (and it's drama) Behind...Can One Be TOO Cautious?

This is a post written to sort out my conflicting feelings on a particular subject. As I post more content, you will notice that my personal, non-review posts are very honest and sometimes emotional. I bare it all here for my readers, because I truly believe that anything I am going through, someone else may be dealing with as well, or may have gone through in the past and can relate. It would be nice to blog under the premise that life is always rainbows and butterflies, but that would be a lie. Life dishes out plenty of sunshine, but also plenty of not-so-pleasant events.... I thought that certain things were in the distant past. And they very well may be...Maybe I am being a bit too paranoid. Maybe not. What do you think?

Let me give a little background here and explain my current dilemma. I am sorry if it isn't too terribly detailed at some points, but I am not in the habit of pointing out people's info or identities and try to remain a certain amount of anonymity when posting about my personal life and situations we are dealing with. So names will not be used, nor will any info that will identify who I am speaking of or that will even point in their direction even remotely.

Here we go...I met my husband when I was 13. We dated briefly, got along great, and eventually went our separate ways, as kids do. We were WAY too young to have a real relationship, and both eventually married other people. Well, we both had bad marriages since we both married people who weren't the most mentally stable, and ended up divorcing them. My husband, growing up, ran with a not-so-good crowd of people. He was your stereotypical bad boy, to a degree. A lot of his "friends" were not the most desirable of human beings to associate with. My husband is also a creature of habit. He continued these relationships because it was what he was used to, and eventually, he outgrew many of them, or was pushed away by peoples' insane actions. For example, when he chose to get into a relationship with me and start settling down, he stopped drinking like he used to, he stopped going to the bar and club every night, and he chose to spend time with me and my son rather than sit around with his buddies all the time. Some of these "friends" and I use that term very, very loosely, decided that because he wanted more out of life and was tired of doing the same thing day in and day out, that they were going to try and create problems in our relationship since I was apparently "taking their Dan away". They wrongly assumed that the changes in him were forced, and I was branded a horrible, controlling, evil bitch because he wanted to settle down and have a family. Anyone who knows my husband knows you can't FORCE him to do anything. Any choices he made were of his own free will, and without pressure from me. I actually offered to wait as long as he needed to get married, and of course, these friends assume that I made him marry me. Yeah. Okay.

Anyway, these people made our lives a living hell for a couple of years. They began by totally disrespecting us over and over, and finally Dan decided that if they couldn't accept the fact that he was happy that they weren't real friends to start with. He chose to cut the drama out and walk away from a handful of people who were creating issues where there shouldn't have been any. Well, of course THAT didn't sit well with these people. We ended up getting harassed, threatened, bullied, and even had to file police reports due to the number of harassing phone calls we got from these people. They broke into his e-mail accounts and MySpace profiles and tried to split us up that way...Heck, they even got his Pizza Hut account suspended because they were fraudulently ordering pizzas from it! It even followed us for awhile after we moved out of the county. Our number somehow got to them, and it started again. It has been very stressful for both of us, and we have had to take certain measures to make it stop. Dan and I both use the same Facebook page rather than have separate accounts just so there's no question (heck, we don't hide anything from eachother, and this was HIS idea. It works for us.) and we had to have our phone number changed.

For the past year, there have been no issues that we are aware of. You see, when we were being harassed, we never retaliated or egged it on. We just ignored it, other than filing police reports when it got way out of hand. We didn't give them any reaction, and we moved, so things have died down. (Thank GOD!) We have since had 2 babies and are quite happy with our drama-free lives. We both have ended toxic relationships and focus on friendships that are more quality than quantity. Things have been going quite well.

Here is my dilemma...Someone who still remains in fairly close contact with some of the nut-jobs recently sent me a friend request on Facebook. This is someone I don't particularly care for because they have insulted me in the past, but that my husband has no real problem with. I told my husband about the friend request, and he told me NOT to add the person because he didn't want to inadvertently open the doors to any more problems. He also told me to send a message saying WHY I wasn't adding them. I argued doing this, since then it makes ME look like the bad guy, and that I didn't want to give any ammunition for people to use to go nuts. I mean, how rude would it look to send a message saying "I'm sorry but Dan told me not to add you cause you talk to so-and-so and they have caused us problems and we like our privacy." I mean, for starters, since I am apparently the BAD guy anyway for "making" Dan settle down, there is no way this person will believe that Dan really DID respond that way. Plus, an e-mail can easily be taken wrong. Even if I were to put it as politely as possible, it could me misinterpreted as being bitchy, even if that wasn't my intent. So after talking to Dan, we decided to just ignore the request altogether. It's better than A. adding the person and potentially having the BS drama start back up because of it, or B. sending a message that would only make me look like a d-bag.

So we simply ignored the friend request. Fast forward to today. I have an unread Facebook message from this person now. I don't even want to open it, because I am afraid it will be nasty and just upset me. I am going to wait, if I can resist, and let Dan open it when he gets home from work.

My question to you is this: Have any of you had to deal with similar situations? How should I respond to this person? Should I add this person and risk having my family be harassed again, and just trust that it won't happen, or should I steer clear of this person altogether because their associations hit too close to home and it's better not to risk it? Any ideas would be appreciated!