How to tell boyfriend's brother..

Anon, friends on here .

How do we tell my boyfriend's brother that we want nothing to do with his partner?

She did something unforgivable, and at the time we chose to just cut her from our lives without getting the rest of the family involved because we didn't want more trouble than we'd already had.

It has worked well so far, but we're finding ourselves having to do little things - like rejecting her requests to follow us on Twitter (why she would think we'd accept that I don't know - it's basically like saying "listen, I know you don't want me in your life anymore, but please let me see what you're getting up to anyway") and making excuses not to attend the very few (and I mean VERY few) events each year where we all used to be present.

Whenever my boyfriend's brother meets up with us, it's clear he doesn't have a clue what's been going on, because he talks about her a lot, telling us things that she DEFINITELY wouldn't want us to know with the way things are. We haven't seen his partner for ten months now, which isn't particularly unusual because we were never "close" as such, but it's getting to the point where we think he'll realise that we're avoiding her - and at some point he's going to want to know why.

As far as I'm concerned, he doesn't need to know what's happened. I don't want to ruin their relationship. I have a feeling she'll do that on her own, but even if not, I would NEVER want to be the one blamed for their break up. The only thing I'd want to say was "We're not interested in seeing her anymore because she did something unforgivable. If you want to know what, ask her."

But we don't know how he'd take that. I have a feeling he'd take her side regardless and say we're silly for carrying it on.. and that may affect my partner's relationship with his brother, which would be sad.

As far as I'm concerned, we're not carrying anything on. Life is too short to have people close to you who would do things like she did, so we just want nothing to do with her. We don't want trouble either. We don't want screaming matches, or family taking sides.. we just simply don't want to see her. What my boyfriend's brother does is his business completely, and if he wants to be with her then that's fine, but it doesn't mean we have to have anything to do with her. Whenever we saw him, it was always on his own, because she has children so is busy with them.. so it's not impacting on our relationship with him the way it is now.

But how do we tell him this without damaging relationships further? I think if we leave it too long it will only get harder to explain.

This sounds like a pretty tricky situation, and I think everyone (including myself) is going to want to know WHAT DID SHE DO?

I don't think you can really play the "She did something we can't forgive but that's all I'm going to say" card, because a) it will lead to A LOT of questions and b) if he goes to her first, there is a chance she can put her own spin on it and make herself look like the victim? If it starts to impact your other personal relationships I think you need to be honest with his brother about why you don't want to see her. Don't make it into a big deal but be like "I'm sorry, but she did X, and because of this me and (boyfriend) don't really think it's appropriate to continue being her friend" or something along those lines: keep it low key. Anything else that happens after that - well just keep your cool and don't rise to anything she says/does.

I'm not too bothered about her painting herself as the victim to be honest. If she puts a spin on it, I have evidence to the contrary (only emails, texts etc but it's enough) and I really really don't want to be the one to say what happened, because it will cause trouble one way or another.